Why We Built Canopy: An £80M Lesson in Inventory Management

In the mid-2010s, I was running a UK ecommerce business that had grown to £80M annual turnover. We had thousands of SKUs, multiple warehouses, and a supply chain that stretched across three continents. Our inventory management was, being generous, a mess. We were using a combination of spreadsheets, email threads, and gut feeling to make purchasing decisions worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. So we invested in OrderWise. It is a serious enterprise resource planning system — comprehensive, powerful, and built for businesses operating at scale. The licence, implementation, and customisation cost roughly £200,000. And it sat there, largely unused. Not because it was bad software. OrderWise is genuinely capable. It failed because it was designed for a type of user that did not exist in our business. It assumed we had a dedicated inventory manager with formal training. We did not — we had a founder (me), an ops manager who was also doing customer service, and a warehouse team focused on picking and packing. None of us had time or inclination to learn a system that required weeks of training to use competently.

What I was sold: a comprehensive ERP system with demand forecasting, warehouse management, manufacturing planning, financial reporting, CRM, and business intelligence. What I actually needed: to look at my phone on a Monday morning and see which products were going to run out, when I needed to reorder, and how much to order. That is it. Every inventory management decision comes down to those three questions: what is running low, when do I need to act, and how much do I need to buy. Everything else — demand forecasting algorithms, warehouse zone optimisation, manufacturing BOM management — is noise unless you have dedicated staff to interpret and act on it. The £200K system could answer those three questions. But extracting the answers required navigating six different modules, building custom reports, and understanding terminology that assumed prior inventory management experience.

It was Bailey & Coco that crystallised the vision. Bailey & Coco is a dog accessories brand on Shopify with 2,845 active SKUs, and when I started working with them on their inventory management, I saw the same pattern I had experienced at £80M scale happening at a fraction of the size.

They were making purchasing decisions based on absolute stock quantities. "We have 200 collars in this pattern — that seems fine." But 200 collars of a pattern selling 30 per week is only 6.7 weeks of cover. With a 27-week lead time from China, they were already 20 weeks behind their reorder point.

The moment I showed them their entire catalogue in weeks cover — colour-coded red, amber, and green — the reaction was immediate: "Why doesn't Shopify show us this? Why doesn't any tool show us this?" Weeks cover was not a new concept. It has existed in supply chain management for decades. But every tool that calculated it was designed for supply chain professionals, not Shopify founders. That gap — an essential metric, buried in systems too complex for the people who need it most — is why Canopy exists.

Canopy is built on one principle: if a founder cannot understand a metric in under 5 seconds, it should not be on the dashboard. Weeks cover, colour-coded: red means order now, amber means plan an order, green means you are fine. That is the entire learning curve. Behind that simplicity sits serious computation. Calculating accurate weeks cover requires pulling real-time sales data, accounting for out-of-stock periods in velocity calculations, modelling supplier lead times including production and freight, handling multi-location inventory, and managing bundle component availability. The system does all of that. But the person using it does not need to understand how. They need to see red, amber, or green and know what to do. This is the difference between software designed for the user who buys it (the founder) versus software designed for the user the vendor imagines (an inventory specialist). Most inventory management tools are built by engineers who understand inventory theory and design for people like themselves. Canopy is built by someone who spent £200K on a system he could not use and decided that founders deserve better.

Canopy is for Shopify brands between £100K and £10M annual revenue who are past the stage where spreadsheets work but nowhere near needing an enterprise system. Brands with 200-10,000 SKUs. Brands where the founder or a small ops team is making purchasing decisions. Brands where simplicity is not a nice-to-have but a requirement because nobody has time for a system that needs weeks of training.

Canopy is specifically not for: multi-channel sellers who need Amazon/eBay synchronisation (use Linnworks), enterprise brands over £20M with dedicated inventory teams (use NetSuite or similar), or manufacturing businesses that need bill of materials management (use an ERP). We are not trying to be everything for everyone. We are trying to be the best possible inventory management tool for Shopify founders who need clarity, not complexity.

Canopy is currently in development and accepting waitlist sign-ups. Early access will be available soon, with founding member pricing locked in permanently for those who join the waitlist. The core features at launch: weeks cover dashboard, purchase order management, phone barcode scanning, dead stock identification, supplier lead time modelling, bundle component tracking, and goods receiving. Every feature will reflect the same principle: make the essential information obvious and keep everything else out of the way. If you are a Shopify brand that has ever stared at a spreadsheet of inventory numbers and thought "I have no idea if this is enough stock or not" — Canopy is being built for exactly that feeling. Because I have felt it too, at every scale from £100K to £80M. And it should not be that hard.