Rocky Brands, a multi-brand footwear company serving wholesale, workwear, outdoor, and specialty retail channels, faced rising planning risk as SKU complexity, customer concentration, and long overseas lead times collided with volatile consumer demand and macroeconomic uncertainty.
In footwear, every style multiplies into size and width variants. Accuracy at style level is insufficient — precision at SKU and customer level determines service performance and margin protection.
Monthly, aggregated forecasting cycles could not keep pace with size-level variability and external demand shifts. Re-forecasting was slow, assumptions lacked external validation, and buying decisions made four to six months in advance amplified inventory exposure.
By implementing Board for Demand Planning and adopting Board Foresight & Signals using macroeconomic intelligence with Gen AI explainability, Rocky Brands reduced data preparation time by 80–90% and shifted from static monthly cycles to continuous, signal-driven planning. External indicators now validate forecasts in near real time, enabling faster re-forecasting, improved SKU- and customer-level visibility, and more confident inventory and supply commitments.
The result is a scalable foundation for integrated business planning across demand, supply, and finance — built for footwear complexity.
Michael Harper
Looking back, I would have moved sooner. The hesitation around changing planning systems was bigger than the reality. Once we started, the value was clear and the transition was far less disruptive than we expected.
Why This Story Matters
- Demonstrates how footwear brands reduce size-level inventory distortion
- Shows how signal-validated forecasting protects margin in discretionary categories
- Illustrates how continuous planning reduces long lead-time exposure
- Highlights improved service defensibility in wholesale-heavy channels
- Proves scalability from demand planning toward full IBP without replatforming
Key Learnings
- Forecast accuracy improves when internal plans are continuously validated against external signals, and clear explanation and interpretation are delivered through generative AI, reducing bias and increasing confidence in short-term execution decisions.
- SKU- and customer-level planning is non-negotiable in footwear and apparel, where product breadth and channel specificity directly affect availability, service levels and inventory exposure.
- Planning speed directly impacts inventory risk when lead times extend beyond 4–6 months. An 80–90% reduction in data preparation time enables near-daily re-forecasting, allowing teams to adjust buying decisions while they still matter.
- Unified planning platforms outperform disconnected tools when governance, agility, and scale matter across demand, supply, and finance.
Industry Context: Why Footwear Planning Is Different
Footwear planning introduces structural complexity that many generic retail planning processes do not address:
- Each style expands into multiple size and width combinations
- Wholesale partners require high fill rates at SKU precision
- Lead times often exceed 4–6 months due to overseas sourcing
- Inventory imbalances directly impact margin and brand credibility
- Discretionary categories are highly sensitive to economic shifts
In this environment, planning must operate at SKU and customer level, continuously validated against external signals. Aggregated, periodic forecasting creates inventory risk that compounds over long buying cycles.
About Rocky Brands
Founded in 1932, Rocky Brands is a U.S.-based designer, manufacturer, and marketer of footwear and apparel serving outdoor, work, military, and western markets. The company operates across wholesale, retail, e-commerce, and B2B channels, managing thousands of SKUs across multiple brands, customers, and regions.
The Challenge: Demand Planning Could Not Keep Pace with SKU Complexity and Volatility
Rocky Brands relied on largely manual, aggregated planning processes built on a monthly cadence, with forecasts managed at style and warehouse level and limited visibility into customers, channels, or individual SKUs. As the business expanded across brands and channels, this approach struggled to keep pace with rising complexity in a highly SKU-intensive footwear environment.
Forecast accuracy deteriorated as plans moved closer to execution, dropping from approximately 80% at quarterly horizons to around 65% weekly, where buying and execution decisions are made. This decline was largely driven by vendor variability and demand volatility.
Without external context, it became increasingly difficult to determine whether forecast misses were driven by market conditions or internal execution.
With buying decisions made four to six months in advance, this created tangible business risk:
- Slow re-forecasting cycles in a volatile retail environment
- Limited ability to respond to customer-specific demand changes
- Increased service and availability risk at SKU and size level
- Inventory exposure driven by long lead times and forecast bias
- Executive plans that were difficult to explain, defend, or audit
The planning process was not just inefficient. It constrained decision-making at the exact moment the business needed speed and confidence.
When size-level availability is wrong, customers don’t wait. They buy elsewhere.
Michael Harper
The Solution: Continuous, Signal-Driven Demand Planning with Board
Rocky Brands selected Board as a unified planning platform to replace disconnected tools and manual processes with a continuous, signal-aware planning capability spanning demand, inventory, and downstream supply decisions.
Why Board
Rocky Brands evaluated multiple planning solutions before selecting Board. While several vendors offered strong point solutions, Board stood out by:
- Faster time-to-value and lower implementation effort
- Native support for granular SKU- and customer-level planning
- Versioning, audit trails, and forecast locking for governance
- Ability to integrate macroeconomic intelligence with Gen AI explainability directly into planning
- A single platform roadmap from demand planning to full IBP
With the implementation of Board, Rocky Brands automated data ingestion and processing, enabling nightly data refresh and on-demand re-forecasting to support short-term execution decisions, rather than waiting for fixed monthly cycles.
What Was Implemented
- Demand Planning with daily data refresh and rapid re-forecasting
- Customer- and SKU-level forecast adjustments to support more disciplined inventory and supply commitments
- Scenario modeling and variance analysis for proactive decision-making
- Board Foresight & Signals to validate internal forecasts with macroeconomic indicators
Board Foresight & Signals integrates external indicators such as discretionary income trends, interest rate movements, consumer confidence shifts, and employment data in key end markets. These signals continuously inform planning assumptions, allowing Rocky Brands to distinguish between execution gaps and true market-driven demand changes.
Board was implemented in partnership with Quisitive, who supported solution design, rapid prototyping, and deployment. The joint team focused on speed, pragmatism, and minimal IT dependency, enabling Rocky Brands to demonstrate value within weeks.
Michael Harper
The combination of Board’s platform expertise and Quisitive’s execution made it easy for us to move fast and stay focused on decisions, not delivery mechanics.
The Benefits: Faster Re-Forecasting, Lower Inventory Risk, and Improved Service Levels
- 80–90% reduction in data preparation time
From one to two weeks of manual data preparation and validation to near-real-time availability. - Planning cycle acceleration and faster decision-making
Teams shifted from static monthly planning to on-demand re-forecasting, enabling quicker responses to demand changes while commitments could still be adjusted. - Improved forecast reliability, service protection, and lower inventory risk
External signal–validated re-forecasting supports more precise inventory and supply commitments across long lead times. - Greater planning control, confidence, and defensibility
Versioning, audit trails, and locked customer forecasts enable clearer accountability and more confident executive decisions. - Shift from data preparation to exception management
Planners spend less time reconciling data and more time managing demand and supply exceptions that impact service and inventory outcomes - New Ways Of Working – Planning with confidence
- More confident buying decisions across 4–6 month lead times
- Improved size-level availability without increasing total inventory
- Faster response to demand shifts while commitments still matter
- Clearer separation between market-driven demand changes and internal execution gaps
- Stronger alignment between demand assumptions, supply commitments, and financial targets
Board reduced our data preparation time by 80–90%, moving us from weeks of manual work to near real-time availability.
Michael Harper
Conclusion / Outlook
With Board, Rocky Brands has moved from periodic, manual forecasting to continuous, signal-driven planning. Demand plans are now faster, more granular, and grounded in both internal performance and external market context.
This transformation extends beyond demand planning. By aligning signal-validated demand with supply commitments and financial targets, Rocky Brands is building the foundation for integrated business planning — where volume, inventory, and margin decisions remain continuously reconciled.
Planning is no longer a reporting exercise. It is a control system for service, working capital, and financial performance.
Michael Harper
Planning shifted from data preparation to exception management.
