Hey there,

It's February. Chinese New Year just happened. And if you're like most DTC brands, you're in a very specific situation right now.

Your inventory is finally landing. Those POs you placed months ago, the ones you sweated over and calculated lead times for, they're hitting your 3PL.

The wire transfers have cleared. Your manufacturer got paid. Your freight forwarder got paid. Your 3PL is charging receiving fees and storage fees.

And now you're looking at your warehouse thinking: "We're fully stocked. We're ready. Let's go."

But then you look at your bank account.

You've got a warehouse full of product. But you can't afford to run ads at the level you want. You're "inventory rich" but somehow cash poor.

What's going on?

Here's the reframe that changed how I think about this:

Every unit sitting in your warehouse is cash that hasn't come back to you yet. You paid for it. You're storing it. You're waiting for it to sell.

Until it sells, that's not "inventory." That's a loan you gave yourself.

And like any loan, there's an interest rate. It's called opportunity cost.

That $50,000 in inventory? That's $50,000 you can't spend on ads that could be driving revenue right now. On new product development. On hiring help. On literally anything else.

The inventory isn't an asset to celebrate. It's cash that hasn't come back yet.

I learned this the hard way at that outdoor brand I told you about.

After we cut the SKUs and improved margins, we thought we were in good shape. And we were, on paper. But the profit wasn't sitting in the bank. It was tied up in inventory. We'd deployed all this cash into stock and now we were waiting for it to come back.

We wanted to invest in growth. We couldn't. The money was sitting on warehouse shelves.

That's when I really understood: margin improvements mean nothing if your cash is trapped.

Here's a number I hear founders throw around: "We have 4 months of inventory."

Sounds good, right? Four months! We're set!

But "months of supply" is meaningless without velocity context.

If a SKU sells 10 units a day, 4 months of inventory is 1,200 units. That might be reasonable.

If a SKU sells 1 unit a day, 4 months of inventory is 120 units. You've got more than a year's worth of stock on a slow-moving product. That's not "prepared." That's trapped cash.

This is what I mean when I say your best seller might be lying to you.

Andrew Faris and I are doing a live workshop on exactly this: “Your Best Seller Is Lying to You (And Your Ads Are Making It Worse).”

We’re talking about the connection between margin, unit economics, and where your cash actually goes. I’ll show you how to do a complete teardown—COGS, landed cost, fulfillment, returns, ad spend per unit—so you can see the real contribution margin on every SKU.

Then Andrew covers what to do with that information on the growth side. How to stop funding your losses with ad spend. How to restructure creative strategy by margin tier. How to build retention plays around your actually profitable customers.

Because that $120K trapped in inventory? It might be tied up in products that are never going to return it fast enough.

I worked with a founder last month who was "fully stocked" on everything. Proud of it. No stockouts in six months.

But when we calculated the cash tied up in inventory, and how long it would take to convert back to cash at current velocity, she realized she had over $120,000 sitting in her warehouse that wouldn't turn into revenue for 8+ months.

Meanwhile, she was struggling to fund a marketing campaign that could have accelerated her entire business.

She wasn't cash poor. Her cash was just stuck.

There's a mindset I see in a lot of DTC founders: "I never want to stockout."

I get it. Stockouts are painful. Lost sales. Disappointed customers. Momentum killed.

But the fear of stockouts leads to the opposite problem: overstocking. And overstocking is slower-acting poison. It doesn't hurt immediately. It just quietly drains your cash, fills your warehouse, and leaves you wondering why growth feels so hard.

Here's the math most founders don't run:

Scenario A: You stockout for 2 weeks. Lost revenue, maybe $15,000. Painful, visible, immediate.

Scenario B: You overstock by 3 months. Cash tied up: $45,000 for 90 extra days. Opportunity cost of that cash: invisible, slow, compounding. Storage fees adding up every month.

Scenario A feels worse. Scenario B is often more expensive.

I'm not saying stockouts are good. I'm saying the goal isn't "maximum inventory." The goal is right-sized inventory. Enough to meet demand. Not so much that you're drowning in your own stock.

Here's something I push hard when I work with brands:

Reframe inventory in every conversation.

"We have $80K in inventory" becomes "We have $80K in cash that won't come back for X weeks."

"We're fully stocked" becomes "Our cash is fully deployed into inventory. How fast is it returning?"

"We need to order more" becomes "We need to deploy more cash. What's the expected return timeline?"

This isn't just semantics. It changes how you make decisions. When you see inventory as trapped cash, you start asking different questions. Should we really order 6 months of this slow-moving SKU? Can we negotiate smaller MOQs and order more frequently? What's the actual cost of that "safety stock" sitting in the warehouse?

This is the shared language that connects Finance, Operations, and Marketing. Everyone needs to understand that inventory equals cash equals opportunity cost.

I'm telling you this now because I know what February looks like for DTC brands.

You just got through the holiday rush. You survived. You're restocking.

And in about 4-6 weeks, a lot of you are going to realize that all the cash you deployed into inventory isn't coming back as fast as you thought. You'll be "fully stocked" and cash-strapped. You'll want to scale ads but won't have the budget. You'll feel the squeeze and not understand why.

This is the moment to build the systems that prevent that cycle. Before it happens again.

10 spots. 12 weeks. This is where we build the systems I've been talking about.

The cohort is for you if you're doing $200K-$3M in revenue. If you know supply chain is a problem but don't know how to fix it. If you've experienced the pain (stockouts, margin erosion, cash crunches that came out of nowhere). If you're willing to put in 3-5 hours a week for 12 weeks to build real systems. If you want infrastructure, not band-aids.

It's not for you if you're looking for a quick fix, if you're not willing to do the work, or if you think supply chain doesn't matter. (If that's you, you'll figure it out eventually. Everyone does.)

Here's what you get:

All 11 modules plus every template I use with private clients. Yours to keep forever.

12 weeks of weekly live calls with me. Not passive webinars. Working sessions where we dig into your specific problems.

Direct Slack access. A private channel with me and the other cohort members. When you're stuck, you ask. When you win, you share.

Hot seat coaching every few weeks. I work on someone's actual business in front of the group. You learn from your own hot seat and everyone else's.

And a community of 9 other founders at similar stages, dealing with similar problems. The relationships people build in these cohorts last way beyond the 12 weeks.

The average student saves more than that in their first month. Between renegotiated supplier contracts, optimized inventory, and eliminated waste, the ROI isn't theoretical.

If you're not ready for the cohort, there's also a self-paced option. Same modules. Same templates. Same community access. Just without the live calls, hot seats, and direct Slack with me. That's $500.

A lot of you are sitting on warehouses full of inventory right now. You're "fully stocked." You feel prepared.

But in a few weeks, when you want to scale and the cash isn't there, you'll realize the truth: you're not cash poor, you're inventory rich. And that's a problem disguised as success.

The founders who figure this out, who learn to see inventory as trapped cash, who right-size their stock, who build systems that turn inventory back into cash as fast as possible... they're the ones who scale without the constant squeeze.

That's what we build in the Accelerator. If you're ready, I'd love to work with you.

Questions about the program? Whether it's right for you? Just reply. I read everything.

I made a video breaking down the inventory-to-cash cycle. If you want to see how I think about this (and the specific metrics I track), check it out:

Until next time,

Lara

P.S. That founder with $120K trapped in inventory? She joined the last cohort. By Week 6, she'd cut her average days-of-inventory from 95 to 52. That freed up over $60K in cash. She used it to fund a product launch that became her best seller. Systems work.

P.P.S. Something big is coming March 3rd. 🎙

We're launching the Supply Chain Lara Podcast — and we're not holding back.

36 episodes. 3 seasons. Zero fluff.

Season 1: The 12 supply chain mistakes you're making right now that won't hurt until you're 10x bigger.

Season 2: The 12 metrics you're not tracking that quietly predict whether your brand survives the next 18 months.

Season 3: 12 real supply chain horror stories from brands that thought it couldn't happen to them. (Spoiler: it did.)

New episodes drop every Tuesday, March through November. This is the stuff no one tells founders until it's already expensive.

First episode lands March 3rd. Don't say we didn't warn you.