How to Build an S&OP Process for a DTC Brand (Without an Enterprise Team)

Most guides to sales and operations planning were written for companies with a demand planner, a supply planner, an ERP system, and a quarterly budget for software. If you're running a brand doing $2M to $20M in revenue, you have none of that. You have a founder, maybe an ops lead, a spreadsheet, and a Shopify dashboard you check too often.

That's not a reason to skip an S&OP process for a DTC brand your size. It's a reason to build a smaller, faster version of one.

What is S&OP, and why does it matter before $20M?

Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is a recurring process that aligns what you plan to sell with what you plan to make, buy, or ship, so sales, inventory, and cash stop working against each other. The Association for Supply Chain Management (opens in new tab) defines it as a process that reconciles demand and supply plans at an aggregate level, with the output feeding financial and operational decisions.

Under $20M, S&OP matters more, not less. A single bad reorder can tie up a quarter's worth of cash in inventory that doesn't sell, or leave you out of stock on your best SKU during your best month. You don't have the working capital or the team to absorb that kind of miss the way a $100M brand can.

The brands that stall out in this range are rarely short on demand. They're short on a system that turns a sales forecast into a buying decision before the forecast is already wrong.

Why the standard S&OP process doesn't fit a DTC brand your size

Search for how to build an S&OP process and you'll find frameworks built for organizations that already have what you don't: a demand planner, a supply planner, a process owner, and separate department heads who each show up to their own review meeting. Those guides assume monthly or quarterly cycles built around ERP data feeds and formal governance structures.

That's not wrong for the businesses it's written for. It's just not built for a team where the same three people run marketing, place purchase orders, and answer customer service emails. Bolting an enterprise S&OP calendar onto a six-person team doesn't produce alignment. It produces a meeting nobody has time to prep for, run by someone whose actual job is something else.

A right-sized S&OP process keeps the same underlying discipline, demand, supply, and finance looking at the same numbers on a regular cadence, but collapses the roles, shortens the cycle, and cuts anything that exists for governance rather than decisions.

What a right-sized S&OP cadence looks like at $2–20M

At this size, S&OP should run on a monthly loop with four steps, and it should take a few hours total, not a few days.

1. Pull the numbers. Actual sales by SKU, current inventory position, open purchase orders, and lead times. This takes 30 minutes if your data lives in one place, and it's the step most brands skip, which is why the meeting that follows usually turns into an argument about whose numbers are right.
2. Update the forecast. Compare last month's forecast to what actually happened, adjust for anything you know is coming (a promotion, a new retail account, a supplier delay), and set the next 60 to 90 days.
3. Check supply against the new forecast. Where does the updated forecast break your current purchase orders or reorder points? Flag anything that needs a decision this week, not next quarter.
4. Make the call and write it down. One short meeting, ideally under an hour, where the founder or ops lead approves the forecast and the resulting buys. Decisions get written down. That record is what turns S&OP into a system instead of a conversation you have to repeat from memory every month.

Ninety days out is usually the right planning horizon at this stage. Longer than that, and a fast-moving DTC brand is forecasting against conditions that will have changed by the time the forecast matters.

Who needs to be in the room when nobody has "planner" in their title?

Enterprise S&OP separates demand planning, supply planning, and finance into different people who each own a review meeting. At $2M to $20M, those are roles, not headcount, and one person often holds two or three of them.

What has to be covered, regardless of who's covering it:

• Demand: whoever owns marketing and sales knows what's driving the forecast up or down (a launch, a promo calendar, a paid spend change).
• Supply: whoever places purchase orders knows current lead times and where inventory is tight.
• Cash: whoever owns finance, even if that's the founder with a bank login, knows what the business can actually afford to buy.
• Decision authority: one person has to be able to say yes and make it stick, usually the founder at this stage.

If one person is covering two of these, that's normal. What breaks the process is skipping one of them entirely, usually the cash view, because that's the conversation that stops a founder from over-ordering on a forecast that felt right in the moment.

What data do you need before your first S&OP meeting?

You don't need a forecasting platform to start. You need four things in a place everyone can see: trailing 12 months of sales by SKU, current inventory on hand and on order, supplier lead times, and your cash position. A shared spreadsheet is a legitimate S&OP tool at this stage. The goal is one source of truth, not a specific piece of software.

If you're not sure whether your data is in good enough shape to start, that's usually the real blocker, not the process itself. We built a demand planning diagnostic to help brands see where their forecasting and inventory data actually stands before they try to run a formal cadence on top of it. It's a faster starting point than guessing.

How do you know the process is working?

Three signals tell you more than a dashboard full of metrics:

• Forecast accuracy is improving month over month, even if it's not perfect. The point isn't a perfect forecast. It's a forecast that gets less wrong over time because you're reviewing it on a schedule.
• Fewer emergency reorders and fewer stockouts on your top 20% of SKUs. That's the inventory equivalent of a fire drill, and it should get rarer, not rarer some months and worse others.
• Buying decisions stop surprising finance. If the person watching cash is finding out about a large purchase order after it's placed, the process isn't connecting demand, supply, and cash. It's just three people doing their own thing on the same calendar.

If none of those are moving after two or three months, the fix is almost never more meetings. It's usually that the wrong person has decision authority, or the data going into the forecast isn't trustworthy yet.

The point isn't the meeting

S&OP at this size isn't about building a process that looks like what a $200M company runs. It's about making sure the person buying inventory and the person watching cash are looking at the same numbers before the purchase order goes out, on a schedule you'll actually keep. Start smaller than feels necessary. A monthly loop you run consistently beats a quarterly framework you abandon by the second cycle.

If you want a clearer read on where your own demand planning stands before you build a cadence around it, see how DTC brands set up demand planning before scaling into new channels, or run our demand planning diagnostic to see where the gaps are.