Estiba is built so that each one gets its chance — that it is where the record says, that it will scan at the till, and that when something is not, you know why before the season decides for you. A short list each week, on the scanners your staff already carry.
Deciding what to buy is examined closely — the range, the depth, the meeting where it was signed off. Keeping the record of it true afterwards belongs to nobody in particular. A stock-take tests it once a year, late and at a standstill. In between, the shelf and the system quietly part company, and nothing in the business is built to notice.
You pay an external team, close down to count everything at once, and the figure is stale within days. The rest of the year, you're guessing.
A small, risk-weighted count each week keeps accuracy live all year — staff do it in the gaps of a normal shift, no shutdown required.
Paper sheets, discretion over what gets checked, and errors noted but rarely resolved. Discrepancies vanish into the next count.
The app sets the morning's list by what is most at stake, nothing closes without a reason, and each session is sealed — so the numbers can be trusted.
Estiba picks each week's count by what's most at stake — what a line is worth, how much of it you're holding, and what has gone wrong there before. No one has to decide what matters.
Operators count the week's items with any barcode scanner. Anything that can't be resolved on the spot is held safely, not lost.
Every discrepancy is resolved before a session closes, then signed and sealed — so you know what is ready to sell, what is not, and the reason beside it.
Estiba is built for businesses that operate their own shops, hold stock worth enough that a discrepancy matters, and move it between locations because customers ask them to.
Typically premium and luxury retailers, and businesses that have grown past the point where everyone is close enough to ask. Practice that lives in people works perfectly until the geography changes.
If you are not sure whether it fits. Tell me the shape of your estate and I will tell you plainly whether this is right for it. I would rather say so than find out together.
Inventory tools are only worth anything if the figures are honest. Estiba is built so the number on the screen is one you'd defend to your CFO — measured, not guessed.
The count concentrates where the money and the movement are, so the same effort tells you more.
A session can't close with units unaccounted for. Every gap is found or formally recorded.
Shrinkage at cost and lost sales at retail, kept separate — no inflated single number.
Estiba runs on the barcodes already on your stock and the phones or scanners your team already carries. Roll it out across every store without buying a single new piece of equipment.
Most retailers your size do, and it does what it was designed to do. What a count cannot tell you is whether what you are holding is ready to be sold — the figure comes back right, and the line that will not scan is still sitting there, and the one in the wrong shop is still in the wrong shop.
The difference is what happens at the shelf. Estiba will not let a session close until every difference has a reason recorded against it, by the person standing in front of the gap — and it keeps those reasons, so the same shelf being short in March and again in April is one fact rather than two surprises.
A short list each morning, done in the gaps of a normal shift. No shutdown, no overtime, no extra people. The list is deliberately short because a long one gets abandoned, and an abandoned count is worse than no count — it produces a figure nobody will stand behind.
No. It runs on the barcodes already on your stock and on a phone, a tablet, or a laptop with a scanner beside it — whatever your shops already have. There is nothing to install in the building and nothing to integrate before you can try it.
RFID makes reading cheap, and that moves the hard question rather than answering it. When counting was expensive you asked what do we count. When it is cheap you are handed a variance list every week with more lines on it than anyone has time to walk over to — so the question becomes which of these matters.
And a reader does not resolve anything. It produces a difference; it does not hold the session open until somebody explains it, or keep the explanations so that a cause surfaces instead of a correction repeating. It cannot see what was never tagged. And it reads presence rather than condition — a tag encoded wrongly at source is propagated with total confidence, where somebody looking at the garment would have caught it.
Estiba is the method; RFID is a very good way of feeding it. Cheap reads mean frequent reads, and frequent reads are what make a variance explainable rather than merely visible.
Per shop, per month, by the size of that shop's catalogue — how many lines it carries, counting every size and colour. Read out of your own data at go-live. Not declared by you, not estimated by me, and not negotiated.
A bigger shop pays more because there is more of it to keep track of — not because it has a better postcode, holds more valuable stock, or has a manager who is worse at pushing back. Devices and users are never charged for separately, and a trial runs at a reduced rate.
And I will not be paid out of what I save you. It is the better-sounding offer and I will not make it: if my fee came out of the improvement, I would be the person measuring the improvement that decides my own invoice — and every number I gave you would be worth less for it.
Estiba is built by Alejandro Gil Galue.
I priced and monitored risk for a living — corporate and investment banking, and then investments of my own — and later spent years in retail stockrooms. Not as a career, but as someone who could not stop looking at them as a system.
What struck me was not disorder. The people were quick, the shelves were organised, the process was followed — and all of that was being read as evidence that the operation was sound. Appearance had become the standard by default, because nothing was in place to assess anything else. You can look tidier. You cannot be more correct.
Anyone who has priced risk recognises the shape of that immediately: an exposure that is real, continuous and unmeasured — and therefore unmanaged, because nothing unmeasured is ever managed.
What took me longer to see was the more interesting half. Somebody chose every line in that stockroom. A person with a budget, whose job was to be right, decided this piece in this colour in these sizes, and backed the decision with money. The stock on those shelves was not inventory. It was a set of expectations.
And a piece in the wrong shop, or one that will not scan, never gets tested. It does not go down as a line nobody could find. It goes down as a line that did not sell — and the following season is bought from that. The judgement was never wrong. It simply never had its chance.
That is what Estiba is for. Not to find out who lost something, but to see that what was planned gets the chance it was bought for.
Estiba is built to be used by whoever is actually standing in the stockroom, which is a design constraint rather than a sentiment. A count is only worth what the person taking it was in a position to notice.
Anyone who works with Estiba works with the person who built it. I regard that as the point rather than a limitation.
A few details, and I will reply within a day or two.
If it looks like a fit, we will go through what a pilot would involve — what gets measured, how, and what would count as it having worked. That belongs in a conversation, not in the small print of a form.
I read these myself and will reply within a day or two.