Senior Demand & Inventory Planner

Vessi is looking for a Senior Demand & Inventory Planner to own the connection between demand, purchasing, inventory and product availability across ecommerce, retail and wholesale.

You will build and maintain the demand forecast across all channels, translate that forecast into purchase recommendations, and manage the health of our inventory across the business.

This role will be expected to identify risk early, challenge assumptions when the numbers do not support the plan, and give the business a clear point of view on what we should buy, when we should buy it, and where inventory should sit.

Responsibilities:

Forecasting

• Build the rolling demand forecast by SKU and channel (ecommerce in Canada and the US, our stores, and wholesale), and update it weekly.
• Build it from sales history corrected for stockouts, and treat planned ad spend as an input. It’s our biggest demand lever, so it has to be in the model.
• Own size curves by style and gender. In footwear, a wrong size run is how you end up out of stock and overstocked on the same shoe.
• Get promotions, launches and seasonality into the plan before they happen, which means staying close to marketing and sales. We’re a rain brand, so fall and winter carry the year.
• Report forecast accuracy every cycle and explain the misses. We care more about the explanation than the number.

Allocation & Inventory Health

• Maintain visibility into where inventory sits and where it is needed most.
• Partner with the Data & Inventory Allocation Analyst on allocation and replenishment.
• Recommend inventory priorities when supply is constrained.
• Flag channel, location, style or size imbalances and recommend transfers or reallocation where needed.
• Monitor sell-through, in-stock rate, weeks of cover and inventory productivity at style, colour and size level.
• Separate true demand issues from assortment, sizing or availability issues

Inventory & Purchasing

• Turn the forecast into purchase order recommendations, working around lead times, MOQs, and whatever our suppliers are actually delivering rather than what they promised.
• Watch inventory across our 3PLs and stores, and raise stockout and overstock risk early enough that we can do something about it.
• Keep lead times, reorder points and safety stock current instead of letting them sit at whatever they were set to two years ago.
• Model what a big promo or launch does to inventory and cash before we commit to it.
• Partner with Merchandising on line plans, seasonal buys and product lifecycle assumptions.
• Provide demand and inventory insight to support initial buys, replenishment and exit decisions.
• Use historical performance to challenge or validate assumptions on new products and seasonal launches.
• Provide a clear point of view when the inventory risk does not support the commercial plan.

This role informs assortment and buying decisions, but does not own merchandising direction, visual line planning or product strategy.

Reporting and Workflow

• Prep the demand view and the assumptions behind it for our weekly performance review.
• Use Claude to cut down the data cleanup and first-pass analysis, then check it before it goes anywhere.
• Validate all analysis and outputs before they are used for business decisions.

Qualifications & Requirements:

• Five years planning demand or inventory, or doing supply chain analysis.
• Degree in supply chain, business, economics, statistics or similar, or the local equivalent.
• Excel at a genuinely advanced level: complex formulas, pivots, cleaning up bad data, and models that someone else can follow. Excel is non-negotiable.
• You’ve forecast before, and you know what forecast bias is and how to fix it.
• You understand lead times, MOQs, safety stock and sell-through well enough to argue about them.
• You’ve used an ERP or inventory system and can pick up a new one without hand-holding. We run NetSuite, Shopify Plus and our 3PLs’ systems.
• You use AI tools and you check what they give you. We use Claude daily and expect you to as well.
• Clear written English, and you can explain a forecast to someone in marketing without losing them.
• You can work on your own, remotely, with real overlap with Pacific hours.
• Curiosity, low ego, high agency, obsession with the work, and intelligence. These are the five things we hire for.

Nice to Have:

• Footwear or apparel planning, where size curves matter.
• Consumer products, DTC or ecommerce background.