Most one-person DTC teams can cut stockouts in half this quarter without buying more inventory — just by tightening the gap between sell-through and lead time on the SKUs that already move. The lever isn’t capital, it’s timing: the reorder that lands on the desk two weeks after you actually needed it is the same reorder that left a SKU sitting empty while a full pallet sat in a supplier’s queue.
Vendloom’s loop watches three numbers at once — last 14 days of sell-through, current days-of-cover on the SKU, and the confirmed restock date on the open PO — and decides whether the reorder should already be in motion. The work happens in the same loop the vendor restock confirmation lands in, so the chase and the drafting are not two different jobs.
The four signals the loop watches
- Sell-through over the last 14 days, not a smoothed 90-day average — short windows catch trend shifts before the reorder speed does.
- Days-of-cover calculated against the supplier’s confirmed restock, not the order date — a “confirmed for next Tuesday” order days-of-cover is twenty-one, not thirty-five.
- Lead-time variance per vendor over the last six POs — Vendloom widens the reorder window automatically when a vendor slips.
- Channel-level velocity (Shopify vs. Amazon vs. wholesale) so the reorder matches where the sell-through is actually coming from.
What the loop does — and what it does not
On a healthy beat, the loop drafts the reorder, threads it into the existing supplier conversation, and updates the days-of-cover — and you read nothing. The ping lands only when real work needs a human: a confirmed restock slipping past its SLA, a velocity band moving enough to re-time the next PO, or a margin floor getting crossed by a freight change. The point isn’t to draft more reorders. It’s to make sure the reorders you already wrote are the ones that arrive when they need to.
“A reorder that arrives on time is invisible. A day of empty shelf is the only number the customer ever sees.”
If a SKU runs empty for two days in a row, the loop treats the restock chase as a real assignment — not a draft — and pings the founder with the chase already drafted and the supplier already pinged. The cost of doing it the other way is a three-day empty shelf and the customer lifetime value that walked out with it.