Trads vs. the Rads. in Retail
I have been a retail person practically all my life. I started with brick and mortar retail that makes me a Traditional (Trads). But since then, I have worked with several pure-play online retail businesses, who I would call Radicals (Rads). While enough has...
Is Your Tail Choking Your Margins?
Siew, the merchandising manager of FashionCo, is unhappy. Her holiday line has performed badly and now the holiday is over – but the tail of products nobody wants to buy is still there! She knows the routine that will follow; the shelves need to make space for next...
We Have Walked in Your Shoes
You know, hardly any of us in the fashion merchandising world are 100% left-brained. It doesn’t go with the territory, and anyhow there are hardware stores and accountancies those guys surely prefer. We like to work with pictures and concepts so we can see in a second...
Where is the Shoe in That?
We human beings are visually wired. We cannot help it: it’s simple evolution and our brains work that way. And we in the fashion world are just not visually wired…we are image wired. Our brains just aren’t geared to process text, spreadsheets and tables very well....
How Much Can You Imagine
Throughout my early years in merchandising, when I was building the Levi’s brand in India, part of my role was imagining a range in all its details. If you have ever been a merchandiser or a category manager, this story will feel like déjà vu! Imagine that you’ve done...
Improving Company-Wide Stock Turn
10th March 2015 – John, a senior merchandiser in a large Asian fashion retailer, Shoe Inc., is struggling to correlate multiple spreadsheets with footwear samples kept on his desk. Along with his colleagues, Sasha and Maria, he’s facing a deadline for planning the...
How Can Kanvas Accelerate Core Processes in Buying Houses?
Ron manages a sourcing agency whose customers are branded chain retailers. He obtains his supplies from multiple manufacturers. His business is complex, managing the matching of his customers’ requirements with suppliers’ production capability and inventory. His...
Are You Seeing the Big Picture in Your Sell Through Reports?
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...
Are There Too Many Lost Opportunities in Your Collection?
In the fast-paced world of fashion, success for retailers hinges on being able to put the right style in the right color or size in the customer’s hand at the right time — a simple concept that is difficult to execute for a number of reasons. Fashion is a perishable...
Looking to Avoid Color Mishaps?
“Lululemon admits to color mishap and Wall Street punishes its stock” On 31 Mar 2017, the Lululemon stock prices crashed by more than 24%. This resulted in market capitalisation loss of approximately USD 2 billion. The reason: Lululemon’s executives blamed the...