When you make what you sell, you are the supplier. Your lead time is your own hours, and your stock exists in two forms: finished products and the materials to make more. Standard inventory advice assumes you can order more units. This guide adapts it for a maker.
Plan two inventories, not one
A candle maker with forty finished candles and no wicks is closer to a stockout than the product count suggests. Track finished goods and materials separately, and tie them together with a simple recipe for each product.
- Recipe: How much of each material one unit uses, for example 180 g of wax, one wick, one jar, one label
- Shared materials: The same jar or clasp used across many products runs out faster than any single product's sales suggest
Work out your real lead time
For a maker, lead time has more parts than a supplier's delivery estimate. Add them up honestly, including the waiting that happens when you are not working.
| Stage | Example: soap |
|---|---|
| Materials arrive | 5 days |
| Queue until the next making day | 3 days |
| Making | 1 day |
| Curing, drying or firing | 28 days |
| Labelling and photos | 1 day |
That is 38 days from deciding to make more to having stock to sell. A reorder point based only on the 5-day delivery would leave you out of stock for weeks.
Find your weekly capacity
Capacity is the limit a reseller does not have. Count how many units you can finish in a normal week, alongside packing orders and everything else. If your sales forecast for the gift season is higher than that number, the making has to start earlier, because you cannot add hours in the busy week.
- Batch size: How many units one session produces, set by your mould, kiln or pot
- Sessions per week: How many you can sustain, not your record
- Build ahead: Divide the extra stock you need by weekly capacity to find when to start
Choose what to hold and what to make to order
Not every product needs to sit finished on a shelf. Split the range by how predictable the demand is and how long the customer will wait.
- Make to stock: Steady sellers and anything with a long cure or dry time
- Make to order: Personalized, large or slow-selling pieces. State the making time on the product page
- Hold part-finished: Keep unglazed mugs, unscented bases or unstamped blanks, then finish them when the order shows which variant is wanted
Set reorder points for materials
Materials need their own reorder points, based on how fast you use them and how long the supplier takes. Watch the ones that could stop production entirely.
- Single-source items: A particular yarn, glaze or fragrance oil from one supplier needs a bigger buffer
- Minimum orders: Bulk minimums may force you to buy several months of supply. Check shelf life first
For the formulas, see how to calculate a reorder point and how to calculate safety stock.
Doing this at scale
StockSense forecasts demand for each finished SKU from your order history, using velocity, trend, seasonality and lead-time-aware safety stock. It recommends a reorder point, quantity and date, and ranks SKUs by revenue at risk, which you can use to decide what to make next. It also drafts purchase orders grouped by supplier. See StockSense.