How a CPG Brand's Financial Model Caught a SKU Trend Before It Derailed Their Projections

Kimberly Green | 2026-04-14

CPG Financial Model SKU Trend Case Study How a CPG Brand's Financial Model Caught a SKU Trend Before It Derailed Their Projections A consumer packaged goods brand was watching their sales data when something odd showed up on the dashboard. For six months straight, one product format was tanking while another was exploding. The natural read was market demand had shifted hard. Customers wanted the smaller size. The larger size was becoming obsolete. The data seemed obvious. So they started building next year's projections around that trend. A full 5-year plan—revenue, margins, cash flow—all built on the assumption that the smaller size would keep winning and the larger size would keep declining. That's the default. Trends continue until someone proves they don't. Then their financial modeler looked at the projections and asked one question that changed the entire plan. The Question That Changed Everything Ashley Aviram, who handles financial modeling for CPG and ecommerce brands at Everledger, put the numbers in front of the founders and asked: "Is this trend real or is something else happening?" The founders looked at it. Then one of them said: "Oh. Yeah. We stopped manufacturing the large size six months ago." They were literally selling through the last inventory. The "trend" wasn't consumer preference. It wasn't market shift. It was inventory depletion of a discontinued product. If they built next year's model on the assumption that the trend would continue, they'd be projecting growth for a product line they'd already killed. This is the difference between a spreadsheet and actual financial modeling. A spreadsheet projects forward. A real model asks questions. Numbers tell you where to look, not what you'll find when you look there. Why This Matters for Your Projections In CPG and ecommerce, sell-through rates are gospel. They're the one metric that shows you what customers actually want, stripped of inventory distortions, marketing noise, and founder intuition. They're the closest thing you get to pure signal. They're also the easiest metric to misinterpret if you don't know what's actually driving the movement. When you run ecommerce SKU analysis accounting through a financial model, a declining SKU can mean almost anything. Actual demand loss. Manufacturing discontinued. Distribution pulled from channels. Seasonal noise. A competitor taking share. Each scenario is a different 5-year forecast. Each requires different assumptions and cash flow projections. Your model can't know which one is real. But it can organize the data clearly enough that the...