Breaking Free from Gut-Feel Buying — How Visualizing Lead Times and Dead Stock Became the Cash-Flow Lifeline of a Luxury Resale Business
Overview
LUCA Inc. runs a luxury brand resale business dealing in labels like Moncler and Balenciaga, sourcing items at auction and selling them domestically and internationally across multiple channels including eBay, Mercari Shops, and BUYMA.
The company managed its inventory and listings with WASABI, a multichannel management tool. But WASABI's native features couldn't answer two critical questions — how long items take to sell after purchase, and how much dead stock is actually sitting in inventory — leaving buying decisions to gut feel. By adopting Squadbase, they built dashboards for order lead-time analysis and dead-stock management, achieving data-driven purchasing and healthier cash-flow management at the same time.
We spoke with Shingo Kuroyanagi, who supports the company's management and data operations, about the journey from intuition-based buying to data-driven decisions — and why these dashboards became a "lifeline" for the business.
The Business — Delivering Brand-Name Goods to the World Across Multiple Channels
First, could you tell us about your business?
Shingo Kuroyanagi
We restore pre-owned luxury brand items and sell them domestically and internationally through online marketplaces. We source from auctions in Japan that are open only to licensed secondhand dealers. We take what we buy there, get it into top condition, and sell it worldwide — our sales now reach Europe, the US, and even South America.
How does the selling side work?
Shingo Kuroyanagi
We use a multichannel management tool called WASABI. Once you register a product there, it gets listed across multiple sales channels — eBay, Mercari Shops, BUYMA — all at once. If an order comes in on eBay and the stock hits zero, inventory on the other platforms syncs automatically. For a resale business selling on multiple marketplaces simultaneously, it's indispensable. And the flip side is that all of our sales data flows into WASABI.
The Problem — Lead Times and Dead Stock Were a Black Box
Where did you feel the pain points with WASABI?
Shingo Kuroyanagi
There were two big ones. First, the lead time from purchase to sale was a complete black box. Second, we had no visibility into how much dead stock we were carrying.
Why does that matter? Because when those things are a black box, your company can simply go under. Whether something you bought on a whim sells in two days or in a year makes an enormous difference to how fast your capital turns over. You can hold hundreds of items in inventory, but if you don't know when each one was purchased and how long it takes to sell, you can't plan your finances.
Couldn't WASABI's built-in features handle this?
Shingo Kuroyanagi
WASABI is fundamentally an inventory and listing management tool, not an analytics tool. You can see basic numbers like sales totals, but there's no way to analyze lead times or sales performance by brand or category. That said, the underlying data is all there in granular form — "registered on this date, sold in this month." I'd been thinking for a long time about how to put that data to work.
The Two Dashboards Built with Squadbase
Tell us about the dashboards you actually built.
Shingo Kuroyanagi
We export CSVs from WASABI, load them into Squadbase, and run two dashboards: order lead-time analysis and dead-stock management.
The lead-time dashboard shows how many days items take to sell after purchase, broken down by brand and category — T-shirts, polo shirts, and so on. For example, while the overall median lead time is 30 days, we can see that shirts sold in just 11 days in May. That tells us that in May and June, we should focus our buying on shirts. Purchasing decisions that used to be pure intuition are now backed by data — and when that happens, both turnover and margins improve.
How does the dead-stock dashboard work?
Shingo Kuroyanagi
We define dead stock as anything that's been in inventory for more than six months — 180 days — and the dashboard flags and updates it automatically. In June, items purchased the previous December become dead stock; in July, the January purchases join them. It all happens automatically, so we can see the picture change over time.
Inventory is an asset, after all. You might say you're holding 20 million yen worth of stock, but if it turns out 20–30% of that is dead stock, that's a very different story. Our approach is to liquidate dead stock even at a small loss and redirect that cash into fast-moving items with short lead times. It's the same logic as investing: cut your losses on stocks that aren't growing and put the money into ones that will. Run that cycle and your turnover accelerates — and your cash grows.
Was there a moment when the dashboard actually changed what you did?
Shingo Kuroyanagi
Absolutely. There was a point when our bank balance was looking thin. We used the dashboard to identify our dead stock, listed it in bulk on a B2B auction, and converted it to cash — auctions let you liquidate immediately. In the past, those items would have just sat in inventory indefinitely. When we'd over-bought and cash was tight, that dashboard was, quite literally, our lifeline.
How long did it take to build?
Shingo Kuroyanagi
About two hours in total to get it to a state I was happy with. The first version took maybe an hour, and then I refined it through back-and-forth in the chat. Once the template is in place, the monthly update is just a matter of importing a CSV. We refresh it once a month and share the results with the team.
The Results — Data at the Center of Management and Strategy
How has the business changed since adopting it?
Shingo Kuroyanagi
The quality of our purchasing decisions changed first. Every month now, we look at the dashboard and have conversations like "prioritize buying items with short order lead times" and "long lead times mean an item isn't selling, so push it down the list." Making lead time a KPI changes which metrics you watch. We now think about buying and selling with a clear target: a median of 30 days — sell everything within a month.
On the numbers side, we hit our targets in both April and May, and revenue is up roughly 1.7x year over year. I won't claim the dashboard deserves all the credit, but there's no question that the concept of lead time has taken root in the team, and having the data in hand changed how everyone thinks. As for dead stock, it was around 15% of total purchase value when we first visualized it, and we've been steadily compressing it by converting it to cash.
How does Squadbase compare to other AI tools you've tried?
Shingo Kuroyanagi
I'd actually experimented with building dashboards using tools like Claude Code. The problem is that chat-based analysis is one-shot. You get an answer in the moment, but the data doesn't accumulate.
Squadbase's biggest strength is that it keeps updating, permanently. There's a database underneath, so every CSV import adds to the data. Dead stock is something that changes as time passes, so being able to open the dashboard and see the latest state at a glance is where the real value is. It's not "produce a report and you're done" — it's being able to respond to the data as the days go by. That's the best part.
Right now we update via CSV once a month, but the plan is to connect Squadbase to WASABI via API and have the agent feature deliver weekly reports automatically. With fresher data, we can run the buy-and-sell PDCA cycle that much faster.
What's Next — Visualizing the Entire Cash Flow
Beyond automated reporting, what else would you like to tackle?
Shingo Kuroyanagi
Cash management — money in, money out. Transactional data that accumulates over time can be captured in Squadbase's database if you build an input form, so we want to go all the way to visualizing the entire cash flow. Inventory is an asset, and the balance between cash and inventory is the heart of running this business. At this point, these dashboards feel like they sit at the center of our management and strategy — a tool for watching the financial balance of the whole company.
Finally, do you have a message for other businesses in a similar position?
Shingo Kuroyanagi
If you want to grow revenue in e-commerce, I believe lead time should be your KPI. But surprisingly few tools can actually surface it. If you hold inventory and sell across multiple platforms, the structure is the same whether you're in resale or any other business. Simply turning the judgment calls you've been making on gut feel — what to buy, what to sell — into data will make both your buying and your selling measurably stronger. Start by importing the CSVs you already have and give it a try.
