How much safety stock should I actually be holding on my hero SKU?
The short answer
Safety stock isn't a gut number, it's (max daily sales x max lead time) minus (average daily sales x average lead time), and if you don't actually know your supplier's real lead time you're just guessing. Indian D2C brands routinely hold 2-4 weeks of safety stock on hero SKUs because supplier lead times here are unpredictable, customs delays, MSME manufacturing slippage, festive-season logistics crunches, and that's a rational hedge, not sloppy planning. Run the formula per SKU, not as one blanket rule; your ₹200 bestseller and your ₹2,000 slow mover need very different buffers.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time. India-specific ones carry a badge.
Why we picked it
The clearest plain-English walkthrough of EOQ for a founder who never took a supply-chain class, and it makes the case, with numbers, that most founders order 30-50% off the optimal quantity, which is real money left on the table.
Why we picked it
A solid ground-up explainer of core inventory mechanics for someone who's never managed stock before, good as a first read before jumping into forecasting tools or formulas.
Why we picked it
A mistakes-first framing is more useful early on than another best-practices list, it's faster to check yourself against a list of known failure modes than to reverse-engineer them yourself.
Why we picked it
A plug-in-your-numbers calculator for the single most useful formula in inventory planning, reorder point = average daily sales x lead time + safety stock. Skip the spreadsheet-building and just get the number.
