How Retailers Can Improve an Out-of-Style Inventory Model

Using data to meet market demand in brick-and-mortar fashion retail

Spring may feel like an overnight shift to consumers—they wake up one day to find leaves on trees and pastel hues in shop windows—but to retailers it can represent a year’s worth of inventory planning.

In fashion retail, that planning is essentially a gamble on how many of which style, in what color and what sizes shoppers will buy in the new season. The constraints of an inflexible, slow-moving supply chain created in the middle of the last century force retailers to put an epic amount of work into forecasting and projecting their inventory orders 9 to 12 months into the future.