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]

Part II

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Add to that the fact that virtually the entire apparel retail industry will be converting to spring lines in early to mid February. Any company that chooses, for whatever reason, to keep cold-weather stuff in stock beyond the first of March is going to lose money, as shoppers simply go elsewhere for their spring / warm weather / vacation wardrobes. The company is then going to have to choose between liquidating the stock at a sale price, or having the SKUs sit in the warehouse over the summer uselessly taking up space. So normally, winter merchandise buyers will aim to have stock available through the Christmas buying season, and then only keep selected items with know sales patterns instock later (for instance, a company that sells lots of down parkas might opt to keep parkas in stock through the end of February because mid-February is a known high-sales time for that item).

Different companies approach this problem in different ways. Some companies choose to make huge orders even late in the season, knowing that they are going to liquidate some percentage of that stock later. Many brick-and-mortar stores do this, hoping that significant sales on off-season merchandise will drive foot traffic into the stores, thereby encouraging customers to also buy the new on-season merchandice that they had to walk through to get to the sale stuff in the back. For catalog retailers, though, or for retailers who calculate price as part of the value of their brand, end of season sales are not good policy, because customers come to count on those sales and then tend to wait and buy things at a discount rather than paying full price earlier in the season.

Incedentally, SKU pressure, combined with sales, is the number one reason that items disappear from the catalog entirely. If a line manager has a Great New Product they want to sell, they need to axe somethinge else to make room for it. Often the thing that gets axed is some one-season only "dog" that had low sales and a high return rate, but sometimes the SKU pressure gets to intense, due to the desire to add SKUs to a known best-selling item (say, adding more colors or an extended size range to a new item that went Top 10 in its first season) that "classic" items go on the chopping block. Sometimes even a whole size (say, size Medium Tall in men's shirt) goes away, in the hope that offering ten new shirts in the "core" sizes will produce more sales/profit than selling the shirts we used to sell in that size did.

I'm not sure if that helps. Does that answer the question?

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

It answers many. Thanks!