As brands scale, inventory decisions get harder — and more expensive to get wrong.

Sales rarely follow plan. Forecasts drift. Suddenly you’re either sitting on excess inventory tying up cash, or scrambling to restock bestsellers you didn’t buy enough of. For many growing retail and DTC brands, this tension shows up as reactive purchasing, unreliable forecasts, and constant second-guessing of buy decisions.

Open-to-buy planning is designed to solve exactly this problem.

An open-to-buy (OTB) plan connects your sales forecast, inventory levels, and purchasing strategy into a single, living view. It helps you adjust buys as demand changes — before overstocks, stockouts, or cash-flow issues derail the business.

In this post, we break down how open-to-buy planning works, the inventory and forecasting metrics behind it, and why scaling brands rely on OTB to replace guesswork with control as complexity grows.

Discover how working with a merchandise planner can help you get the most out of your demand planning software and create the ultimate demand plan.

Ready to add a demand plan to your retail strategy? Here are 3 things you need to know on why outsourcing it to the experts can make your plan more effective!

Learn these 5 common forecasting errors and how to avoid them with an inventory planner. Boon’s merchandise planning can give your business a competitive edge!

Inventory forecasting and demand management help you achieve your financial goals. Let Boon help you alleviate the stress of inventory management planning!

A strategic demand planning process is crucial to retail success. Perfect your retail business’s inventory planning with these three demand planning methods!

Learn how to better predict sales and make informed decisions for your retail business by leveraging these effective sales forecasting tools.

One of the most important parts of running a successful retail business is recapping your sales and utilizing your data to make better assortment decisions. The insight available in your sales and inventory data will determine which products you should reorder and chase inventory on and which items to mark down and move on from.