The Flieber Category Vision: Building the “Inventory and Sales Synchronization System” That Doesn’t Exist Yet

 

The Flieber Category Vision: Building the “Inventory and Sales Synchronization System” That Doesn’t Exist Yet

You can tell exactly which campaign drove which sale. But you can’t tell if you’ll have inventory to fulfill the orders.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fabricio Miranda, CEO and Co-Founder of Flieber, articulated a vision for a category that doesn’t exist yet—one that addresses an organizational dysfunction so obvious that most companies don’t see it.

“My dream is to create what I call the inventory and sales synchronization system,” Fabricio explains.

Why Physical Retail Never Needed This

The current organizational structure made sense once. In physical retail, the connection between marketing spend and inventory was fuzzy.

“In the physical world at retail, you have people getting products into stores and then the stores would sell the product, right. So the marketing would be much more a branding that you were trying to strengthen the brand. And there was no direct connection between the marketing investment that you did and that specific sale,” Fabricio explains.

You ran brand campaigns. People saw them. Some bought products. But you couldn’t track which campaign drove which purchase. Attribution was impossible, so coordination was unnecessary.

Physical retail could absorb this disconnect. Stockouts in one location didn’t prevent sales elsewhere.

What Digital Changes

Digital retail fundamentally transforms attribution.

“When you go online, there’s a direct relationship. You do a sponsored post or sponsored listing on Amazon, for example, the customer will click on that will buy and you have direct attribution of a sale to that specific campaign,” Fabricio notes.

This changes everything. When you know exactly which campaign drove which sale, you should be able to plan inventory around marketing activity.

But companies don’t.

The Organizational Inertia Problem

Organizations evolve slowly. The structure that made sense for physical retail persists.

“Today what happens is that people are making those sales, those direct sales, without knowing what’s going to happen with their inventory because these are two separate areas in the company, because that’s how retail evolved,” Fabricio observes.

This isn’t a technology problem. It’s organizational architecture. Marketing departments and supply chain departments have different leaders, different KPIs, different planning cycles.

“The marketing people don’t even know who the inventory people are. Don’t even want to talk to the inventory people. The inventory people are there in the trenches trying to play the catch up game and trying to operate and desperate to be able to bring the products in time.”

This separation made sense when attribution was impossible. It makes no sense with perfect attribution.

The Obvious Question Nobody Asks

Once you see the disconnect, the solution seems obvious.

“Nowadays I think there is a direct connection between sales and inventory. Are you going to make a promotion? Yes. How much more you want to sell or do you plan to sell with that promotion? X percent, based on the history and etcetera. So if you sell x percent, what is your inventory going to look like three months from today? Are you still going to have inventory? Are you going to run out of stock or are you going to be overstocked?”

These questions should be asked before every campaign. They’re almost never asked because people planning campaigns don’t have visibility into inventory, and people managing inventory don’t see upcoming campaigns.

The result? Marketing drives demand spikes that inventory can’t support. Or inventory teams order based on historical trends that don’t account for upcoming promotions.

Inventory-Based Advertising

Fabricio’s vision flips the model. Instead of planning inventory around marketing, plan marketing around inventory.

“Advertising campaigns should be based on your inventory availability. If you have 2000 units and the next batch that you can replenish is going to be 60 days from now when you’re going to have only 1000 units, you can only sell 1000 units. If you sell more than 1000 units, you’re going to be out of stock. That’s so obvious, right?”

It is obvious. Which makes it remarkable that “almost no companies do that today.”

The math is straightforward. Current inventory: 2,000 units. Next shipment: 60 days, 1,000 units. Sellable inventory: 1,000 units.

Go beyond that and you create stockouts. Fall short and you’re sitting on dead inventory. Yet marketing and inventory teams don’t coordinate this.

Why the Category Doesn’t Exist Yet

If the problem is obvious and the solution is clear, why hasn’t someone built this?

Fabricio acknowledges the challenge: “I still dream with the day that people understand that Excel spreadsheets are amazing. I’m the biggest Excel geek. I use Excel every single day for everything I do. But Excel spreadsheets are just not the right tool to solve the complexities of inventory planning.”

The immediate competition isn’t other systems. It’s Excel and organizational inertia.

Companies have lived with separated functions for decades. The dysfunction is normalized. The workarounds are institutionalized.

Creating a new category means changing not just technology but organizational structure.

What Success Looks Like

Fabricio’s vision isn’t proprietary.

“Each different brand that migrates to a inventory planning system is a win for the whole category. So everybody wins because now the paradigm is not anymore Excel versus inventory planning is which inventory planning system is better for me.”

This is category creation thinking. The first goal isn’t to beat competitors. It’s to convert the market from non-consumption. Get companies using systems instead of spreadsheets. Get marketing and inventory coordinating.

When that happens: “I hope we get to that world where I’m going to come back here and say, hey, my competitor now is not Excel anymore, is XYZ.”

The Broader Implication

The biggest opportunities exist where organizational structures lag behind technological capabilities.

Digital retail made perfect attribution possible. But organizations still operate with physical retail structures. That gap is the opportunity.

The companies that will define the next decade aren’t building better versions of existing categories. They’re building infrastructure for capabilities that technology enabled but organizations haven’t adopted yet.

The Takeaway

“Nowadays I think there is a direct connection between sales and inventory,” Fabricio observes.

The technology to operationalize that connection exists. The organizational structure to support it doesn’t. That’s the category opportunity.

For founders thinking about where to build, look for organizational lags. Where has technology fundamentally changed what’s possible, but companies still organize around old constraints?

That’s where categories get created. Not by building better tools for existing workflows, but by building infrastructure that makes new workflows possible—workflows that should be obvious but aren’t, because organizational inertia is stronger than technological change.

That’s what Fabricio is doing with Flieber.