I've built planning from a blank spreadsheet — and run it at scale.

I've spent eighteen years in merchandise planning and buying — at Macy's, Kate Spade, Diesel, Alexander Wang, Tommy John, Bombfell, and Zadig & Voltaire. Department store, designer, luxury, and direct-to-consumer.

I've seen planning from both sides. As a first planning hire, I built the function from a blank spreadsheet — teaching myself open-to-buy by trial and error, because nobody else in the building knew it. Inside established brands, I led it at scale. That combination is what founder-led brands need: someone who knows what good looks like at scale, and how to build the right-sized version for a brand that isn't there yet.

What that work has looked like:

• Freed $4M in cash by clearing 360,000 units of aged inventory — ending a stalemate by overlaying finance's own depreciation schedule, so the dead stock identified itself.
• Built a global replenishment model that ended core stockouts and brought core from 10% back to 30% of sales, at full margin.
• Cut allocation from two weeks of manual data entry to two hours, with the strategy built in.
• On a consulting engagement, found fringe sizes driving 5% of sales while tying up 30% of inventory cost — and refocused the buy on the sizes customers actually wear.
• Worked directly with production on a staged commitment system: fabric committed nine months out, color and sizes as late as possible, so what landed matched what was selling.

The gap I see most often isn't a weak buyer — it's a missing planner. A great buyer owns the product: the taste, the vendors, the line. A planner owns the system around it, from the financial plan to the season's exit. Founder-led brands usually hire the buyer first, and they're right to. Pair that buyer with a real plan, and you can finally see where the money goes.

That's why I do this fractionally. You get the eighteen years without the $200k+ executive search — amplified by AI tooling I've built so one senior merchant can do what used to take a team.

Off the clock: Long Island, lifting, running, and being a dad.