Peak season revenue may look great on a bar chart. But if you are staring at a strong top line and a shrinking cash balance, your dashboard is not telling the full story. You do not just have a “marketing problem” or a “warehouse problem”.
You have an inventory problem.
According to IHL research, inventory distortion, the combined cost of overstocks and stockouts, costs retailers about $1.7T every year, roughly 1% of global GDP.
For a DTC brand, that number shows up as:
And underneath all of that is the same pattern: You are being forced to make container sized decisions with partial information, in a supply chain that moves slower than your customers.
The goal for your brand is simple. Turn the leftover 2025 inventory into a clean plan where you: see where your capital is actually stuck, redesign 2026 decisions around cash, and understand where a direct fulfillment model can change the equation.
Before you start drastically reducing leftover 2025 inventory, you need a detailed overview of your working capital. Stop staring at “total units”. Start looking at cash velocity.
Do not treat every SKU the same. Break your catalog into three buckets:
Within each bucket, tag SKUs as: Fast movers, Slow movers, and True deadstock. This takes you from “we have too much inventory” to “we have too much of this type of inventory, in this role, moving at this speed.” That is actionable.
This is not about a complex financial model. It is a carrying cost audit, focused on storage, handling, and time.
A simple way to frame it:
(Landed cost per unit + monthly storage per unit) x months to sell through = the true drain on cash
If 3,000 units of a $9 SKU sit for 6 months at $0.30 per unit per month in storage, you are not just sitting on $27,000 in cost of goods. You also pay about $5,400 in storage and handling for the privilege. That is roughly $32,400 in capital and cost tied up in one decision.
Multiply that across categories and you understand why the bank balance feels tight even when revenue looks strong. Shopify calls out this same structure in its breakdown of inventory costs. It notes that inventory is often one of a retailer’s largest expenses once you include ordering, storage, and management costs, not just the product itself. That is why this audit matters. Once you see the real cost of doing nothing, “we will just let it sell over time” stops being a neutral choice.
The goal for brand in 2026 is not to guess better.
It is to reduce the amount of cash you commit before demand is proven, and to shorten the time between spending and earning that cash back.
Stop placing 10,000 unit bets that live or die on a forecast from six months ago. Move to a test and scale physical model. Use smaller initial production runs, air freight samples, or direct fulfillment to test the SKU in the real world. The goal is to get a clean read on velocity, not to maximize early margin. Once a SKU clears your target velocity and margin thresholds, commit deeper. Until then, treat it as a test, not a full season anchor. Use sell through data and promo performance to adjust how often you reorder and how deep you go. This is where AI forecasting can help.
AI-driven forecasting can reduce error and support these decisions when it is used well. McKinsey has found that AI forecasting can cut supply chain errors by 20-50% and boost efficiency by about 65%, according to a 2024 BizTech summary of AI in retail demand forecasting. The point is not that AI will magically fix inventory. The point is that a staged physical model gives you more chances to act on the signal it surfaces.
The “ocean gap” is the time your products spend on a boat or in a containerized pipeline. For many brands, that is 30 to 45 days where you have fully paid for product, you are paying for transport, and you have zero ability to react to a TikTok spike or a demand drop.
During that gap, the market moves, but your options do not. A 2026 model that is designed for cash changes the sequence:
You still care about landed cost and freight efficiency. You just stop optimizing for a lower cost per pallet at the expense of locking up working capital for 90 days.
You cannot fix 2025’s mistakes with a 2015 logistics model. If you keep shipping bulk containers into a domestic 3PL and then hoping the plan was right, you are choosing a structure that bakes in high risk and low cash visibility.
Portless exists to change that structure.
Instead of prepaying production in large batches, putting those batches in containers, a paying duties, freight, and storage before you know what really sells
Portless lets you stage inventory near your factories in our hubs, ship orders, not pallets, directly from those hubs to your customers, and turn production spend into cash in as little as 6 to 9 days in many key markets instead of 60 to 90 days.
What that looks like in practice:
If you want to see how this plays out with your own numbers, you can plug your assumptions into the Portless Direct Fulfillment ROI Calculator.
