Tl;dr: Operating across 63 sales channels with fewer than 300 SKUs, Loop Earplugs improved marketing-driven demand forecasting accuracy to 80.5% and reduced forecast error by 50% by embedding marketing intent and channel-specific demand dynamics directly into planning.
Operating a fast-growing, marketing-driven B2C business with roughly €200M in revenue and a relatively small catalog of fewer than 300 SKUs, Loop Earplugs faces a uniquely challenging forecasting environment.
Loop Earplugs sells its products across 63 different channels, each with different launch calendars, pricing, and product lifecycles. While the catalog is compact, demand behavior is anything but simple. Forecasting accuracy depends on understanding how launches and marketing pressure interact differently across channels.
The Challenge: Multi-Channel, Marketing-Driven Demand Forecasting
Loop Earplugs needed to forecast demand in an environment shaped by multiple overlapping factors:
- A small product catalog spread across 63 channels
- Channel-specific launches, pricing, and lifecycle timing
- Long, multi-step substitution chains that vary by channel
- Cannibalization between new products, variants, and colors
- A marketing-driven demand engine with limited budget visibility
Traditional forecasting methods struggled to handle this level of granularity while remaining scalable and consistent.
Bringing Structure and Reliability with Intuendi
To improve forecast reliability, Loop Earplugs partnered with Intuendi to bring more structure and clarity into demand planning. Together, the teams focused on building forecasts that reflected how demand actually behaves across channels, products, and launches, even without access to detailed marketing budget data.
Intuendi supported Loop Earplugs with a granular product and channel forecasting framework that made it possible to:
- Model complex substitution chains across channels and staggered product version launches to improve forecasting accuracy across variants
- Capture cannibalization effects at the product variant and color level
- Enrich forecasts with intended marketing investment data, even with limited context
Given lead times of six to eight weeks, forecast accuracy was measured using cumulative quarterly error to stay aligned with operational reality.
“The Intuendi team took the time to understand the nuances of our business and worked closely with us to build a forecasting approach that reflects how demand is created across our channels. Their support has helped us establish a more structured and consistent planning cycle, enabling better alignment between demand planning and the realities of a fast-moving, marketing-driven business.“
– Tiemen Serroen, Supply Chain Manager, Loop Earplugs
The Results
By embedding marketing intent and channel-specific dynamics directly into the forecast, Loop Earplugs achieved clear, measurable improvements:
- 80.5% forecast accuracy across Q2, Q3, and Q4, corresponding to a 19.5% cumulative error
- Forecast error reduced by approximately 50% when marketing investment intention was included
- Reliable monthly planning despite unknown absolute marketing budgets
- Greater confidence in forecasting launches, substitutions, and channel-specific demand shifts
Turning Marketing Intent Into a Forecasting Advantage
As Loop Earplugs strengthened its demand planning process, Intuendi helped the team turn planned marketing spend and past sales data into more accurate forecasts across multiple channels and product transitions. By aligning forecasting with how demand is actually created in a marketing-driven business, Loop Earplugs built a more reliable foundation for monthly planning without increasing operational burden.
