Operations-Marketing Alignment: Session Recap: Key Takeaways from Shelley Gupta at Commerce Media Brand Summit 2025

2026, CMBS. Presentation: When Operations and Marketing Actually Talk: Turning Inventory Headaches into Growth Opportunities

Announcer: We have our next presentation when operations and marketing actually talk, turning inventory headaches into growth opportunities. Please join me in welcoming Shelly Gupta, founder and CEO of bake it box to the stage.

Shelley Gupta, Founder & CEO, BāKIT Box: Thank you. Sorry, was there a clicker somewhere? Okay. Hi everyone, I'm Shelly. I'm the founder of Bake It Box.

Thank you. Thanks so much. And I'm really excited to talk to you guys about this simple topic, but can really change the trajectory of your brand. So when operations and marketing actually talk. So as a founder of a very lean team, we have seen the consequences of misalignment firsthand from, inventory issues to promotional issues with just the teams not talking to each other, and I come from a small business, but this really does apply to all sizes of business, whether you're a CPG, a beauty brand, a toy brand, you name it. So my background in is in business and finance. I am originally from Toronto and I moved to Chicago to pursue my MBA at Chicago Booth before joining Accenture strategy for four years working with tech companies across the country.

That was all before I started in the startup world. I worked for a beauty brand before starting Bake It Box. So I've seen both sides of the coin, the corporate structures and the entrepreneurial chaos. And for those of you who are not familiar with Bake It Box, we create STEM inspired baking kits for kids five and up.

Each kit includes shelf stable premeasured ingredients like your flour, your sugar, your cocoa powder, your vanilla, along with a detailed recipe guide and hands-on activities that introduces kids to STEM concepts, but as well as art, language, culture, and geography. And so operationally, we operate out of a facility in Chicago where we hand pack, co-pack and fulfill all of our products.

And on the marketing side, our team takes care of our product, launches, our website, our Amazon campaigns, our all of our. All the pretty stuff. So the reality is though, even with a small team like mine, we've seen the issues that come up with inventory being out of stock, promotional prob problems, product launches, that could have gone very differently.

So just to understand who's in the room today, quick show of hands. Is anyone on the operations or supply side of your businesses? Okay, we got all media people here today, so hopefully this is still helpful. But we're gonna talk about how you can be communicating more with your ops and the supply chain side of your business.

So how many of you may have had an issue in your own department? 'cause you didn't know what OPS was doing. A couple of you. Okay, awesome. So this has definitely happened to us. So last spring I launched a new bundle kit product called our Berry Blast Off Tarts. It's our cosmic kitchen bundle, which essentially introduces kids to science experiments.

A bunch of recipes and it was really doing well. Heading into the end of school year. We were in the springtime and into the summer, so our operations team was working on getting all of our paper products printed. We essentially were running low on all of the paper products, so they were working with our printers to get that.

Coordinated and ordered, but marketing did not know this. And started running campaigns around end of school year and then back to school year in, July and August through our email, paid channels, social media, everything and sales were coming in really fast. It wasn't until we had hundreds of backfilled orders when OPS basically had to reach out to our marketing team and say whoa.

We don't even have the product to fulfill. We had the demand, we had the customers, and we had the marketing momentum, but we did not have any product. Now, just a quick no, one more question. Have you ever launched a campaign and then realized your product may have been on back order? I'm getting a lot of nods.

Yes. So this is something that happens in any size business. You could have, a small team or a huge conglomerate. These issues still happen. Because marketing is optimizing for growth and operations is optimizing for efficiency and forecasting. So if these teams are not aligned, both sides are gonna lose.

So we're gonna talk a little bit about the costs of this misalignment. So zooming out a little bit a McKinsey survey found that CPG brands lose up to 12% of annual sales due to poor demand and supply coordination. Now, 12% is a huge number if you're thinking about that in dollar terms. A smaller brand, $10 million brand, 1.2 million, a hundred million dollars brand, 12 million.

Now the loss doesn't show up immediately. It doesn't just, it's not just cash coming outta your pocket, but it shows up in the quiet moments, in the friction, in the inefficiencies, in the missed opportunities. So let's talk about what that all looks like so it can show up in various ways. Uncaptured, demand inventory, pileups wasted spend, sell through risks or brand inconsistency.

Uncaptured demand. So just like that example I gave you of our Barry blast off tart example, my marketing team is promoting something that's not ready to ship. So our demand is spiking. Fulfillment can't keep up. Customers have to wait. Customer service has to scramble. And then you gotta offer incentives and discounts to smooth things over with your customer.

So revenue might be coming in, but your margin is shrinking and your brand trust is taking a hit. So in e-comm, timing is really everything. So if ops and marketing are not aligned, your momentum ends up just being a liability inventory pile up so operations might overproduce a skew that marketing is ready to.

Either phase out or, end up discontinuing. And we definitely have experienced this as well. We had a kit called Our Gluten-Free Better For You, chocolate Cake. And Marketing was taking it offline as just a part of a new strategic shift last year. But our ops team had gone ahead and ordered a huge batch of maple syrup and oat flour.

So we essentially had thousands of dollars sitting on in inventory tied up for a product that we weren't even actively selling. And inventory, as is not always your finished good. Sometimes it's your, cash sitting on a shelf wasted spend. So this I'm sure is very relevant for those of you in the room today.

Automated ads, evergreen campaigns, keyword targeting. We once discontinued a six months subscription only to find that we had a Google page or Google ads were driving traffic to that page. So we were basically spending money to send customers to something that didn't even exist. Now, so just another point that your misalignment doesn't always mean physical product doesn't always mean bottom line.

It could be your paid acquisition dollars being burned and sell-through risks. So mis forecasting can definitely cause expiration risks, especially with CPG. During Christmas of 2024, my team over forecasted by thousands of units, and come January we were sitting on a bunch of holiday inventory that naturally just did not fit the season anymore.

So when ops and marketing are not aligning on your demand planning or on your like promotional timing, then your seasonal products can also become dead weight. And lastly, brand inconsistencies. This one's a little more subtle. Last year, as I mentioned, we were working on a whole marketing strategic shift, and that meant scrapping some of our other ideas.

So we started adding a bunch more educational content, more material in the boxes, and more recipes, just all sorts of stuff in the box. So marketing was promoting this across all of our paid channel, across email, social, et cetera. And what we didn't realize is we had some leftover inventory of that pre-experience.

So operations was still fulfilling kits that did not have these new, materials in the box. So a customer reads all about this enhanced experience from the website or the ad they purchased through, and they open the box and it's not what they expected. So this is really not even just a communication issue, but it's really just a brand inconsistency issue.

And that's where this. Quote, or sorry, this this statistic comes to life because it's not just in inventory your losses, it's in your margin erosion, your wasted ad spend, delayed launches, customer churn, brand trust. It's really all of the things that can go wrong with operational headaches and not communicating with your marketing team.

So let's look at the opposite side of the equation. What happens when ops and marketing are not working in silos but actually work together? This is where you can hopefully not only prevent problems, but also create opportunities. So we've got agile product shifts, smart promotions, reduce waste, and improved ROI and cross-functional insight.

So agile product shifts, so when ops and marketing are in sync, your mo slow moving inventory can hopefully be less of a liability and more of an opportunity for innovation. As I mentioned, we had all that access, maple syrup and oat flour, and instead of just writing off that inventory and moving on, we brought both teams together and operations was able to show us exactly what they bought and what was in stock, and marketing could look at trends in seasonality for our year.

And together we were able to create a new product called our Canadian Maple Pies Kit, where it was the same core ingredients, new positioning, and a fresh story. What could have been just stranded inventory and a lot of losses turned into some incremental revenue for us. Smart promotions. So when marketing campaigns are informed by real time operational visibility, you essentially can promote what you have on site and what really needs to move.

Last holiday season, so just this Christmas that just passed. We were going to just run discounts across the board, which most people do during Christmas time. But instead, we created something called our holiday bundle campaign, and we were promoting it as a surprise item inside. And what that surprise item was our older inventory that we were trying to phase out.Shelley Gupta, Founder & CEO, BāKIT Box: So it gave us an opportunity to essentially give away a bunch of product that was just not part of our new marketing, but was still sellable and still a great product. We got rid of those better for you. Chocolate cakes and a bunch of other skews. And to customers, it's exclusive, it's fun.

They're getting some free stuff. And from our perspective, it was really inventory optimization. So when ops can share with marketing what needs to move, then that kind of creates your next campaign reduce waste and improved ROI. So when you align your teams naturally, you're gonna reduce your markdowns, reduce your expired inventory, reduce your paid media inefficiencies.

And increase your margin and alignment. And ROI improvement is really just, is not just in one channel, in one department. It's gonna be shared by everybody. And so hopefully that means for all of you guys in the room who are hoping your campaigns are constantly converting, it's not leading to operational chaos.

And lastly which is really the foundation is. Cross-functional insights. So operations, holding really critical data. They've got the lead times, the minimum order quantities, cost inputs, inventory, risk, shelf life, but marketing also holds very powerful insights, seasonality, your trend data, customer behavior, channel performance, and your upcoming launches.

So when these two data sets do not interact, your growth will naturally be slower. But when they do interact, you can get smarter with your growth plans and drive your next campaign. So tell you what happened with our thousands of items that we over forecasted in 2024. This was our holiday recipe. It was called our Holiday Peppermint Trees.

It's essentially a cookie base. It's covered in white and dark chocolate with almonds and peppermints. We over forecasted like crazy and we were sitting on thousands of units come January, 2025. No one's buying holiday items in Jan and Feb. So we basically had six months to move the inventory from a freshness perspective and from just the perspective of what our year was looking like.

So we could either discount it heavily and probably only move a handful of items. Or write off all the inventory, but we chose not to do either of those things. We called a cross-functional meeting and we were able to have ops share shelf lives. What's an inventory? What could be broken down?

Marketing was able to share what our year was looking at and what we, where we had gaps, and then product development came in as well and brought that creativity and we were able to ask a different question in the room of what can we create with what's in front of us? And the result was our holiday peppermint trees turned into our Aurora swirl cookies, same cookie base, same chocolate topping.

We swapped the almonds and the peppermint for spirulina, which pr created these vibrant colors that mimicked the Northern Lights. And instead of a holiday theme, we were able to create a spring theme for around science of color. So new educational content, new branding, new photography, new positioning.

But we were able to sell off all those base ingredients. Majority of them preserve our margin and extend the product life into a new season. We saved all the paper materials for the next Christmas, but all the food items were essentially able to be saved. So again, at the end of the day, it's just when teams are operating in silos, you're gonna end up with liabilities and your access inventory.

And when teams are communicating, your access inventory can turn into something innovative. So how do you do any of this? I'm gonna leave some tips that hopefully could apply to some of your departments starting with syncing your calendars and not just your meetings. Weekly touch points with your ops team or, your supply chain teams are sometimes not enough.

You need to align on a regular basis where before you lock in your campaigns, marketing's gonna really need to know what's fully stocked. What's at risk? What has long lead times and what can't be replenished quickly so that your campaign planning really sits right next to forecasting and production.

The second one being invo inventory dashboard. So a lot of the time marketing just doesn't know what's sitting in the warehouse, so if you could create a simple dashboard, sharing your overstocked SKUs. Ingredients that are near expiration, high margin items or anything that's like looking to be moved or gonna be potentially discontinued soon.

And that gives marketing a clearer idea of what to promote. Next. Third, designing products with flexibility. So if your inputs are modular, in our case, they were, because we use, ingredients, packaging inserts, labels, things that can be swapped in and out, it helps you pivot a little faster, whether that means.

A new season, a new theme, or even just updating your content very quickly. It only worked for us with that Aurora swirl cookie example because we had a very adaptable kit. And then lastly, rewarding collaboration. So if marketing's really only measured on revenue and then ops is measured on efficiencies, it can cause tension, it can cause higher costs.

But if you introduce some shared KPIs or something that is shared across both teams, then you're really aligning incentives. So whether that's maybe it's fulfillment success or margin protection, then you're not just encouraging collaboration, but you're essentially measuring it as well. And at the end of the day, it's not about avoiding the mistakes, but trying to unlock the opportunities between the teams and turning your inventory headaches into growth opportunities.

Thank you.