Consultant
Amy Washington
The short version
Amy is part merch brain, part systems expert. She can read the trade and fix the report that's misreporting it, which is a rarer combination than it sounds.
Before Commerce Thinking
Louis Vuitton → Debenhams → AllSaints → Reiss → Joseph → Burberry → Acne Studios (Head of Planning)
What Amy does
→ Works the full merchandising cycle: budgets, range architecture, pricing, size curves, allocation, trading, markdown, exit → Bridges merch and IT - fluent from SAP to custom BI → Builds the reports people actually use, rather than the ones that get built and ignored
What Amy is looking for
Static data that nobody can act on.
Sharing a SKU list with marketing doesn't get you a creative response. Visual reporting, shared delivery tracking and one readable view does - and gets buying, planning and marketing working off the same picture instead of arguing over spreadsheets.
With Commerce Thinking
“"I could do accountancy - but for fashion."”
The origin story
Amy studied Accounting and Finance, not merchandising. The switch came from helping friends on fashion courses with the maths behind their ranges, and realising she could do accountancy but for fashion.
At Acne Studios she arrived to a business with no planning function at all. Growth ambitions circulated as topline percentages that bore little relation to the finance plan or what stores were budgeted to deliver. Predictable results: excess stock, missed sell-through, constant disconnects between buying expectations and what was actually selling.
She built the OTB process, introduced budgeting by region and category, and led the implementation of a proper allocation tool - replacing weeks of senior buyers distributing hundreds of SKUs across dozens of stores by gut feel.
She also found VAT and currency conversion practices that had been quietly inflating buy numbers for years. Correcting them was the turning point: for the first time, sales values, budgets and buys matched.
Amy's advice for founders and ops leads
- 01
Get great at spreadsheets. Excel is embedded in the role - understand how it works
- 02
Be curious. Build the sheet, fix the report, ask why the tool nobody uses is better
- 03
Embrace the unpredictable. Designs change, lead times change. Keep pace
- 04
Read the spec, not the title. In some organisations "Planner" means "Merchandiser"
Ask Amy about
→ Why your buy numbers and your sales plan don't reconcile
→ What a planning function does that a finance team can't
→ How to get marketing and buying looking at the same product
Work Amy has been part of
Where Amy works
Elsewhere
Start with an audit and we'll bring the right people to the table.
Contact