Until June of 2024, Eric Halpern was the sole buyer for all Fine Fettle locations. As the company grew to 13 locations (with many more opening soon), they added another buyer on staff and needed a much more streamlined process to manage inventory.
Prior to using Happy Buyers, their process was much like every other buyer’s process: tons of spreadsheets, pivot tables, and plenty of mental math on top.
“We were living in the stone(r) ages, managing multiple excel sheets with countless formulas, pivot tables, and would frequently encounter data issues that required time and research to resolve.”
- Eric Halpern, Director of Pricing and Procurement at Fine Fettle
Eric Halpern
Director of Pricing and Procurement, Fine Fettle
Fine Fettle is in 3 states, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Georgia. It may go without saying (but we’re going to say it anyways) that each state has a totally different buying dynamic.
Connecticut is currently limited from the standpoint of product variety; as a result, there is little room to stand out from competitors in the same market. However, just over the border in Massachusetts, there are over 200 vendors. This results in very different buying patterns and cadences.
It’s simply too chaotic for one buyer to manage all of this in general, but even with more buyers on staff, the data is still unruly and prone to errors. These errors show up in many ways, but let’s just talk about one use case as a perfect example of how complex buying decisions get in this environment.
“I start thinking about orders three weeks out, then place them two weeks out, and then schedule them one week out to try to get the best image of the inventory every time. That way we don’t have to settle for whatever's available a few days before we need to schedule everything out.
So, that adds another layer of complexity: thinking about sell-through and what other stuff is coming in within those two weeks while not over indexing on a category and not reordering a SKU that's already coming in.”
While spreadsheets can help get you somewhere close to what you need to know, provided you have incredible skills in Excel, there is no way to escape the mental space and energy required to be as accurate as possible.
The only way to get better at buying is to bring on a great toolset that does all this mental work for you. That’s what led Eric and Dan to start Happily Buying.
Fine Fettle is now able to order inventory in 14-day intervals with very high accuracy. Using our Lead Times feature, they no longer have to do the mental math to pad order times.
Dan and Eric are ordering in lock-step and saving tons of time to use on the fun part of buying: discovering new and exciting brands for their customers to enjoy.
“I estimate I am saving a minimum of 5 hours a week updating and creating my own tracking documents. That number would increase exponentially if this is something I was doing manually (checking all different platforms for little pieces of information to form a big picture). In those cases where buyers are using meatball-math to figure this stuff out, I would imagine it saves anywhere between 2-4 hours a day depending on how much ordering you do." - Dan
When you remove the mental math and reduce the spreadsheet jockeying from the buying mix, you free up time to make more magic happen. Or, you know, take a real vacation
Staying ahead of your competition starts with knowing the opportunities you need to seize. Take our roadmap today.
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