Hello fashion brands and fashion retailers, are your systems geared to respond to consumer demands at high speed?
Let's think of a scenario wherein a new geometric print in a solid base color starts flying off the shelves in the stores near a business district. As the trend picks up in couple of weeks, the store managers would want similar prints in solid base to maximise sales on the emerging/purchase territories.
The planner, who is tracking the sales patterns at all stores, "sees" this early, and releases stock transfer orders of similar styles from other stores to the stores in business district. Thus the planner helps respond to fashion trends at its peak for the stores in business district and prevents potential loss of sales opportunity in other stores.
That's an ideal situation for both consumer and retailer, because it will achieve a higher sell through ratio!
For Fashion businesses, the sell-through rate (percent by volume of merchandise that is sold at full price) varies depending on the brand. This impacts their overall profitability and long-term viability. On top of discounts, retailers end up spending a significant amount of their annual marketing budget on communicating the announcement of sale.
Although, an industry average sell through (% stock sold at full price) is ~60–70%, some top retailers, have managed to rise up to 85%.
One of the proven strategies, to push up the sell-through rates, is speed to market. Lets look at some ways in which retailers are achieving speed to market:
- Fast fashion retailers like Zara achieve shorter cycle times by delaying decisions further and further along in the process.
- Instead of dictating styles months in advance, these companies take their cues from in-season trends. The most admired fast fashion retailer in India, Max Fashion, is making a fine art out of in-season merchandising responses.
- Instead of advertising heavily, fashion brands like Uniqlo and H&M rely on a frequent flow of new products to lure customers into stores. These retailers introduce new designs to the racks two to three times per week versus just ten to 12 times per year in traditional stores.
- Fast fashion retail brands often carry fewer vendors into the value chain, beginning at the design and ideation stage, rather than the traditional fashion brands, including vendors in just the supply chain. Beginning with placing fabrication orders, Zara is famous for its practices to re-configure its garment fabrication vendor's manufacturing, to respond to in-season trends, where a line of A-line skirts may be converted very quickly to Pencil silhouette, based on the early response from stores, during a season.
Tracking sell-through is a traditional measure that is used by most fashion retailers and fashion brands. It is how the fast fashion retailers interpret, and respond to this metric, often times at blinding speed, across their value chain, that creates value for the brand, business and consumers.
Collaborate with Kanvas
Kanvas associates images with data, and using pre-defined templates in Kanvas, you can create a visual top sellers report within minutes, so you can see beyond tabular data.
Kanvas allows you to drag and drop images of line items and their data from ERP and elsewhere. Next you create your own filters. Then you tag, sort and group the images, decide which numeric and verbal information to attach or combine them into output pictures and share them. You can limit your use to identifying stock numbers and collection details, or include performance details, such as sales, margins, inventory movements and warehouse stocks.
Leading Asian brands have chosen Kanvas and are seeing the difference in their merchandising performance and reduced time in creating actionable reports.
Schedule a demo today and learn how you can improve your sell through ratio!