Why We Built Forstock

Before Forstock, my job was to help brands move their products around the world. I was VP of Sales at a digital freight forwarder, which meant I spent most of my days on calls with founders and operators at growing Shopify brands. Containers, customs, ocean freight, the long journey a product takes from a factory to a customer's door. I lived in that world.

Freight is a precise business. Once a brand decided what to ship and when, we could tell them with real confidence when it would land. The strange thing was that the hardest part of the whole chain was never the part we handled. The hardest part happened before a shipment even existed. It was the decision itself. How much do I order? When do I place it? What happens to my cash, and my shelves, if I get it wrong?

I heard the same questions on almost every call. Smart, capable operators running real businesses, and they were all quietly guessing at the single decision that made or broke their quarter. Order too little and you stock out during your best week of the year, then watch demand walk straight to a competitor. Order too much and you bury your cash in a warehouse for months while the bills keep coming.

I later learned just how large this problem is. Analysts at IHL Group put the annual cost of getting inventory wrong, stockouts and overstocks combined, at roughly $1.73 trillion across global retail. That number is hard to picture until you remember what it is actually made of. It is thousands of individual brands, each making the same anxious guess I kept hearing on my calls, and each paying for it.

What surprised me was that this was not a knowledge problem. These were sharp people. It was a tools problem. They were running their entire inventory strategy on spreadsheets that broke the moment the business got interesting, or on apps that treated every product the same way. A brand new launch and a tired old SKU got the same generic reorder point, as if the future were just the past on repeat.

At some point I stopped seeing individual customers with individual problems and started seeing one problem, repeated thousands of times. Every brand was trying to answer the same question, what do I buy and when, and nobody had built them a tool that actually respected how their business worked. So I left to build it.

Forstock is built on a few stubborn beliefs.

The first is that planning should run on your real numbers, not a copy of them. Most brands end up rebuilding their business inside a spreadsheet, and that copy starts drifting out of date the moment something sells. Forstock connects to where you actually sell, across every store and channel you run, and pulls your live sales and stock into one consistent picture. One view, kept current, so you are never planning against last month's reality.

The second is that you should never plan against an average. Average daily sales, average lead time. Averages feel responsible. They are also where the truth quietly disappears. A product that sells five units a day for three weeks and then two hundred on launch day does not have a meaningful average. So Forstock does not flatten your history into a single number. It looks ahead, day by day and product by product, and shows you the exact day an item is going to run out and the exact day you need to place an order to stay ahead of it. Real demand is lumpy. Launches spike, promotions distort, seasons swing. Your planning tool should expect that, not smooth it away.

The third is that the math should be honest and something you can see. Same inputs, same answer, every time. No black box quietly changing its mind. When Forstock tells you to buy, it shows you why, in numbers you can check yourself.

That is the product we wished those brands had when I was on the phone with them. Not another dashboard to admire, but a system that turns the scariest decision in the business into something you can trust and act on.

We are at the very beginning of this. There is a lot still to build, and we would rather hear hard feedback than easy praise. But the reason Forstock exists is simple. Too many good brands lose too much money guessing at a decision that should not require guessing.

So we built the tool to stop the guessing.

If that sounds like a problem you know too well, I would love to show you how Forstock handles it. You can book a demo here, or get in touch and tell me what you are wrestling with.

— Rami