Know how much you’ll sell, before you make it.
Antevon does demand forecasting for indie beauty brands that sell through retail. In two weeks, for one fixed fee, we build the forecast for every product at every retailer and hand it to you in Excel, with the decisions priced in pounds.
press feature lands wk 31
Why beauty brands run out of the bestseller and overstock everything else
Indie beauty brands tend to grow the same way: direct-to-consumer first, then Boots, then Sephora or Space NK, then the EU pharmacy chains.
Revenue arrives faster than infrastructure, and by £10M a brand is often running production, retailer commitments, and promotions off a spreadsheet built for a much smaller company, maintained by whoever has owned it longest. Usually that is the founder.
The spreadsheet fails in a predictable way. Beauty demand is not smooth: one piece of press can triple a hero product’s sales for six weeks, and every retailer orders on its own calendar, in its own pattern, around its own promotions. A sheet that averages last year cannot see any of that coming.
So the same brand ends up over and under at once: sold out of the bestseller in the week that mattered most, holding stock that will not move, and without a defensible answer when a retailer asks for a twelve-month commitment.
None of this is unusual. Demand planning is a full-time profession, and almost no indie brand employs one. Antevon fills that gap without the hire.
DTCBOOTSSEPHORA · SPACE NKEU PHARMACYWhat the audit leaves behind
At the end of the two weeks you receive two files, both in Excel, both yours to keep.
The first is the forecast: a number for each product, at each retailer, for each month ahead, built from your own sales history and the retail calendar, with press spikes and promotions modelled rather than averaged away.
| Product | Retailer | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hero SPF 50 | Boots | 4 200 | 5 800* | 3 900 | 3 400 |
| Hero SPF 50 | Sephora | 1 900 | 2 600* | 1 700 | 1 500 |
| Niacinamide Serum | Boots | 2 300 | 2 400 | 2 500 | 3 800† |
| Gentle Toner | Space NK | 600 | 580 | 540 | 510 |
* press feature, wk 31 † retailer promo
The second is a decision ledger, which translates the forecast into actions with the money attached:
- 1Raise the week-30 Boots order, Hero SPFprotects £40k rev
- 2Halve the next Gentle Toner production runfrees £18k cash
- 3Decline the Sephora promo as proposedavoids £9k loss
- 4Pull serum production forward three weekscovers Oct promo
Each line carries its working. This is the one behind line 3:
Sephora proposal · Hero SPF 50 · −25% for two weeks
Decline as proposed.
Counter: −15%, one week, wk 36, after the press dip.
Production sizing, cash planning and promotion calls are all priced the same way, off the same forecast.
There is no software to adopt and no login to keep paying for. Both files keep working whether or not you ever speak to us again.
Built on the £10M demand desk a founder ran inside a leading beauty group.
That desk produced the numbers a national retail business was run against: forecasts that buyers at the multiples pushed back on, promotions modelled before they were signed, deduction lines pursued until the cash came back. The audit applies the same method to your catalogue.
How an audit runs
The fee is fixed and quoted before we start.
You bring
- a sales export,
- the reports your retailers send you,
- an hour for our questions.
Imperfect data is normal; cleaning it is part of the work, not a surcharge.
Your exports stay confidential: used only to build your files, shared with no one, deleted on request.
You get back, on day 14
- the forecast for every product at every retailer,
- the decision ledger priced in pounds,
- a working session where we go through the first decisions together.
For brands that want the forecast kept alive there is a monthly desk: every number refreshed each month, the ledger maintained, and each retailer promotion read for profit before you sign it. Scoped to your catalogue and retailer count, never billed by the hour, and entirely optional. A good part of the audit’s value survives without it.
Fair questions
- What is a demand forecast?
- A number for each product, at each retailer, for each period: how much you will sell, so you can decide how much to make and buy, and which promotions to sign. A good one models press, promotions, and seasonality instead of averaging them into a trend line. And it is a best current line, not a prophecy: every month it is redrawn against what actually sold.
- We already forecast in a spreadsheet.
- The desk our method comes from ran on Excel too, so keep the spreadsheet. The weakness is the guessing inside it, and the risk that the whole system lives in one person’s head. We replace the guessing; the result stays in the Excel your team already uses.
- We’re not a beauty brand.
- The method was built on retail demand, and it transfers. Beauty is where we start because it is where the desk came from. If you sell through retail and no one owns the forecast, write anyway.
- Are we too small for this? Too big?
- If you sell through retail and no one owns the forecast full-time, the audit fits. The model scales with the catalogue: the same desk serves a founder sizing a first retailer commitment and a commercial team running a multi-retailer P&L.
- We’ve been burned by consultants before.
- The engagement is structured so nothing rests on faith: a fixed fee quoted up front, fourteen days, and the files stay with you whatever you decide. Judge the model in your hands rather than the promises on this page.
- I run ops or commercial, not the whole company.
- The desk serves you the same way: a forecast your team runs without retraining, and a profit read on each retailer promotion before it is signed.
Two weeks from now, you could know.
Bring a sales export and your retailer list; fourteen days later you have the forecast, the ledger, and your first decisions. If one of us has already messaged you, reply there. Otherwise:
Priced like a desk, not a licence
The audit is one fixed fee. The monthly desk is a retainer scoped to your catalogue and retailer count. Neither is billed by the hour, because what you are buying is a number you can act on, not our time.
A note on timing
If you plan stock in Shopify Stocky: its API shuts off on 31 August 2026, and brands that depend on it are choosing replacements now. An audit takes fourteen days. Count back from your next production run or press window and the start date sets itself.