Fashion seasons

[msmemory_archive]

I'm perfectly delighted when I score a skirt on clearance at the mall After Christmas Sale but not nearly so delighted when I discover it's too late in the year already to buy more flannel shirts from Bean's for jducoeur.

Comments

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

I have to split this up because apparently LJ has a 4300 character limit on comments. Who knew?

----------- Part I -----------

Hmmm. In a nutshell & at a very high level.

A "sku" is one color/size of an item. So one flannel shirt, for example, might have at least 16 SKUs (four colors x four sizes). Each SKU needs its own "pick location" (think, a cardboard box) in the warehouse. The warehouse only has a finite number of pick locations, so there are only a finite number of SKUs that a company can keep instock at any one time.

From a financial standpoint, it is not good business practice for a company to keep items in its warehouse that are not being picked daily. Add to that the fact that a company will normally need to buy a minimum order (a large number, usually - say 1000 units) of each SKU from the vendor. For that reason, items that have specific seasonal appeal (say, flannel shirts, shorts, down parkas, hawaiian shirts, etc) are "scheduled" to be seasonally "outed" - that is, the buyers estimate how many of Flannel Shirt X they will need for the entire season, and order that many (thus meeting their minimum order) about a year in advance, often scheduling delivery of that item in four or five smaller shippments because the pick location can only handle so many garments at one time.

With me so far?

So it gets to be the end of December, and the buyer for Flannel Shirt X realizes that they are soon going to sell out of Flannel Shirt X. The buyer has two choices: order [the large minimum] more, or let the item go out of stock and lose sales. The following pressures factor into the buyer's calculation: how many more do I expect to sell? In what time-frame? (because the shorts buyer REALLY needs ten pick locations to be freed up in the next eleven days to make room for the early-season shorts orders that are begining to come in) If the buyer guesses wrong, and large amounts of unsold inventory end up sitting over the summer in the warehouse, there will be hell to pay, because a) other buyers were expecting those pick locations to be free and b) the company paid up-front for inventory that is now sitting in the warehouse, that won't sell (and thus recoup its purchase cost) for many months yet - perhaps not even until the next fiscal year.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I watch this stuff going on, from my armchair. It's kind of a fun sport.

I did just get the Spring LLB catalog in Saturday's mail. Today's order for flannel-lined jeans will soon be followed by one for LL Polos, I'm sure :)