Demand Planner (Remote, USA)

Demand Analyst

Are you a supply chain professional who sees stories in spreadsheets and knows how to turn them into smart, timely inventory decisions? Are you a statistics and math nerd with a passion for motorsports? Want your analytical skills to directly influence lap times and customer satisfaction? Apex Wheels is looking for a Demand Analyst to join our growing Supply Chain team and help ensure that the right wheels are available when our customers need them.

Apex is a leading provider of high-performance automotive wheels and accessories, catering to the motorsport and performance car enthusiast community. Our mission is to provide wheels that deliver real and measurable performance and to protect consumers from a misleading industry full of fashion-focused wheels through exciting technical education.

The Supply Chain team keeps inventory flowing smoothly from vendor to customer. As our Demand Analyst, you will leverage sales forecasts and historical customer buying behavior, ensuring our Demand & Inventory Manager always has a forward-looking view of what to buy, when, and how much. Your self-starting abilities and data-driven insights will let Apex meet customer demand without tying up unnecessary capital, freeing leadership to focus on strategic expansion. This is an analyst-first role : you'll help us move from a scrappy, Excel-driven environment to a more automated, scalable planning system, and you'll be expected to lead that transition, not just operate within it.

Apex's Demand Analyst will turn raw sales and inventory data into clear, forward-looking plans that keep our shelves stocked with exactly what's needed : never too much, never too little. You will apply statistical forecasting to turn noisy, multi-SKU sales data into accurate demand signals that drive production, inventory, and purchasing decisions. In this role, you'll translate real-world events like new fitment launches, flash sales, supplier transitions, or sudden surges in interest into accurate, data-backed forecasts that drive smarter inventory and purchasing decisions. Your core responsibility is to produce dynamic forecasts and inventory targets that guide Apex's planning and purchasing decisions. These will inform purchase orders, drive sales, and impact broader investment strategies. You'll work across ~2,000+ active SKUs (and growing), where pairing logic and multi-attribute fitment complexity make pattern recognition and data joining skills essential (think relational joins, grouping, and outlier detection).

Our Demand & Inventory Manager is eager to have support in demand planning, but has limited bandwidth to provide highly structured training - we don't have videos showing you how to do demand planning here. This is not an entry-level position, and you'll be expected to self-start, take ownership of tasks, and proactively ask questions. In your first weeks, you'll need to put meetings on calendars and seek out answers as you learn our systems, tools, and products.

Once onboarded, you'll work with a high degree of autonomy while staying closely aligned with purchasing, customer experience, and Finance. Expect to spend much of your time in numbers and less time with people. If you love building models, challenging assumptions, and owning your domain, you'll thrive here. If you don't already know the difference between XLOOKUP and VLOOKUP, you don't have the minimum skills needed to succeed. A typical week could involve recalibrating seasonality curves, reconciling stock levels to identify shortages, modeling shipping cost scenarios for the CFO, or explaining to stakeholders why a sudden spike in demand is likely temporary.

Over time, you'll own the tools, cadence, and accuracy metrics that define demand planning at Apex. Your work will influence purchasing decisions, support Finance with cash flow projections, help Customer Service set realistic ETAs, and guide Marketing and Sales based on real inventory constraints. Success looks like materially better forecast accuracy and faster decision-making as we migrate from manual processes to a more robust system.

This isn't a role where you can rely on off-the-shelf demand planning software to do the thinking. Today, our methods are Excel-heavy; the future involves more sophisticated solutions implemented or built by you. In the short term, you'll need to evaluate the spreadsheets and logic we use, refine or rebuild them, and explain your reasoning clearly to stakeholders.

In the near term, you'll lead the selection of a software solution that meets our unique needs. If off-the-shelf tools aren't cost-effective, you'll build a new demand planning system through AI or other technology solutions. Your early days will involve learning our current methods, identifying opportunities for optimization, and executing a plan to systematize demand planning. Your ability to integrate scalable, intelligent solutions will keep Apex lean, agile, and data-driven. Success in this role means closing the gap between data and decisions so Apex can grow smarter and leaner.

Applicants who have worked purely in logistics or warehouse planning will not have the experience we need. Prior use of pivot tables and SUMIF formulas in Excel is not enough. If your work has been in environments with well-established processes or pre-built demand planning systems, you likely don't have the knowledge gained from building and maintaining the underlying logic, which is essential here.

To succeed here, you must be both technically and intellectually focused, approaching problems with a disciplined, serious mindset. You should be comfortable with a balanced mix of complex and routine tasks, maintaining stability and consistency while developing imaginative, data-driven solutions. You should be able to work alone without outside pressure, maintain tight control over the quality of your work, and meet deadlines without sacrificing accuracy.

Your experience in demand and inventory planning allows you to connect numbers to real-world outcomes. True success comes from strong data analysis, clean datasets, spotting genuine demand shifts vs. short-term noise, and turning findings into clear actions. You should bring fluency in inventory math (service levels, safety stock, lead-time variability, reorder points) so your models align with purchasing realities. We expect you to investigate anomalies before anyone asks and challenge questionable data when necessary.

Knowledge of performance wheels helps, but if you don't have it, your ability to learn the product quickly will serve you just as well. You can tap our Fitment Experts for context as needed. It's your combination of technical insight and analytical thinking that will help you spot issues before they escalate and identify trends before they're visible to others.

This is a salaried position and is exempt from overtime. Your core team works on Pacific hours, and so you'll need to be comfortable working on West Coast hours, regardless of what time zone you are located in.

You're a spreadsheet power user with the brain of a statistician. Whether you spend your weekends wrenching in the garage or you just know how to break down demand by wheel bolt pattern and width offset, you care about how your work connects to performance on and off the track.

You respect the tools and processes that got us here and are motivated to implement improvements that get us further - fast. You thrive in ground-floor, less-structured environments and can create order without waiting for perfect systems.

You can confidently tell our executives that their assumptions are incorrect based on facts, because you know that accuracy is more important than schmoozing people.

You either already speak our enthusiast language or you're hungry to learn.

You have a natural curiosity for how numbers explain real-world outcomes, and you bring order to data the way others organize a desk.

Accuracy matters to you - hitting a forecast within a few percentage points feels like a clear win.

Your first response to an unexpected sales spike is to investigate causes and adjust the model before anyone asks. You manage details systematically, meet deadlines reliably, and are comfortable discarding outdated assumptions when fresh data suggests a better approach.

You are a self-starter, enjoy independent learning, and are not afraid to ask questions, schedule meetings, and track down the information you need to learn and get the job done.