“When exactly the right date to re-order was, and how much stock you had left for a given number of days, that just wasn't clear to us.”

Finex's products can get quite heavy. The bestselling smart doorbell weighs five kilos a unit. It was the one product Finex already shipped by sea, because flying it in would have cost too much. Everything else went by air, because the alternative was gambling on sea freight based on a forecast in Excel. At these weights, the way stock gets shipped from China heavily influences the margin on each sale.

Everything ran on Excel. Finex tracked what it held and built a forecast for the month ahead, and on paper that worked. What the spreadsheet could not tell them was the thing they actually needed: the exact date to place the next order, and how many days of cover each product had left.

They were already professionalising. They had hired someone in China to keep the forecast current and flag when new orders were due, and he still works with them today. But the forecast still lived in a spreadsheet that someone had to keep up by hand, and Excel, in Teun's words, "is just not the way to scale properly, especially with new products coming in." Asked whether it had started to feel like guessing, Teun agreed: "Yes, that's the right word for it."

Then came the freight decision. A financing round gave Finex the room to move its volume from air to sea, at two to three euros less per unit on a range that ships tens of thousands of units a year. The catch was 50 days: that is roughly how much lead time sea freight adds. So before switching, they needed a forecast they could rely on that far ahead. "We wanted to move from air freight to sea freight without running short on stock," says Teun. "That was the main reason we went looking for a platform like Rewize."

Finex had been looking for a platform for a while. Searching online kept leading to the big names like Exact and AFAS: systems built around stock administration and balance sheets, with little in the way of forecasting. And forecasting was what they were after. "We really wanted forecasting based on growth," Teun says.

Optiply came up too. An entrepreneur Teun knows uses it and is happy with it, but he runs more than a thousand SKUs as a reseller. As a D2C brand with 45 SKUs, Finex never seriously considered it.

Then Teun saw a LinkedIn post from Thijs about a brand he knew that had just started on Rewize. Rewize puts forecasting at the core and is built for D2C Shopify brands, so Teun asked for a demo, which quickly led to implementing the platform.

His advice to other founders follows from that: "If you have a stable business that keeps growing, you don't have a thousand SKUs, you don't have a system for it yet and you want a relatively affordable way to get started, I'd recommend Rewize."

Rewize took over the part the spreadsheet could never do: the timing. Onboarding took under an hour. Since going live, Finex has placed orders through Rewize in 27 of 33 weeks, which makes ordering a weekly routine.

Teun checks it almost every day. "It's very clear. Within five seconds you know what's going on, what the latest sales are, what the peaks and dips are, per product."

• Reorder dates per SKU, so everyone knows the day the next order has to go out
• At-risk, healthy and overstock labels, so the state of the whole catalogue shows at a glance
• Sea freight modelled in the platform, with lead times and payment terms set per supplier
• Their colleague in China works directly in Rewize, on his own login, deciding from days of cover

The summer put the longer lead times under pressure. Finex more than doubled year on year: revenue in August 2026 was 2.3× August 2025, and July was its best month ever. Orders sized on last month's sales land 80 days later into a bigger business than the one that placed them, and in July and August several bestsellers ran short. The five-kilo doorbell, the product that started the whole sea-freight question, held up best.

Rewize showed the shortfall early and made it quick to fix: the gap was visible per SKU, with the date stock would run out. In the last week of August, Finex placed its Q4 buy: 11 orders, more than 17,000 units, inside the window an 80-day lead time allows before Black Friday. Since September, every bestseller has been in stock every day, and the projected stockout dates on the bestsellers sit in January and February 2027, well after the holiday peak.

Less cash is tied up in stock. The old pattern was ordering a thousand solar cameras because next month looked promising, and then watching them sit. Overstock and healthy stock are now separate things you can see, and the excess runs down on its own. The solar camera went from 1,245 units at go-live to under 500 today, with one reorder in between, while selling more than 3,500 units in the year. "That's really nice for our cashflow, because you don't have unnecessary stock any more."

No more delay emails. When the doorbell used to run out for two or three weeks, the team wrote to customers to say their order would take longer. Nine out of ten waited, so most of the revenue survived, but writing all those emails took up a lot of the support team's time.