Sourcing is one of the most important success factors for a fashion retailer. The main challenge in sourcing is of course to buy the right styles and high quality collections that suit your customer base.
Sourcing is by far the most crucial element of a healthy retail business. Therefore it deserves a good bit of strategic senior management attention.
Fashion Retailers have a number very industry specific challenges on their hands. For starters: the relatively short product life cycles paired with long production times and lead times make it very hard to plan. Understanding your inventory risk at an early stage in the season or even before placing your orders, is absolutely essential.
We believe that it is key to buy goods from targeted product segments that show the highest potential. Our goal is to use sales and customer data from the past, to identify fast conversion items, brands and product categories.
Sales-, and customer data show the way for fashion retailers
By applying data models on past sales data, we are able to identify which goods have the highest likelihood of being sold first and best. Next to that, we look at the actually contribution margins. That is: for each product category, brand, fashion item or even (waist-) size has brought us.
Once we have a good picture of the status quo, we use market insights and trends to support our hypotheses. In essence, we try to find a statistically relevant basis for any purchasing decision.
Using past sales and customer data does not necessarily mean that the collections of the next season will hit home. However, we are able to reduce the inventory risk significantly. We do so by giving high quality input to the buying team for their next purchasing round.
Interested in more information and case studies?
We work together with some of the largest fashion distributors in Europe as well as renown fashion retailers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
