How to Decide Which Designs to Reprint

Judge reprints on sell through by size and how quickly the run cleared, not on total units or which design you personally like. A design that sold forty five of fifty and left five extra smalls behind is telling you something completely different from one that sold eighteen and left two extra double extra larges.

Total Units Is the Wrong Number

Units sold is the number everyone reaches for and it is close to useless on its own, because it says nothing about what you had available. Twenty of twenty sold is a different result from twenty of sixty sold, and they will look identical in a sales total. Sell through, meaning the proportion of what you printed that actually sold, is the number that compares fairly across runs of different sizes.

Once you look at it that way, some of your favourite designs turn out to have been carried by quantity, and some of the ones you dismissed turn out to have sold everything you gave them.

Sell Through by Size, Not Overall

Break it down further. A design with a healthy overall sell through can still hide a size that vanished in a week and a size that never moved at all. The overall figure hides the two facts you actually need: which sizes were underordered, and which were overordered.

Do this per size, per design, and write it down at the point the run ends rather than reconstructing it later. It takes ten minutes and it is the closest thing to free money in small scale merch.

How Fast It Sold, Not Just That It Sold

Time to sell separates the designs worth reprinting from the ones that eventually cleared because you kept mentioning them. Both end at zero stock. Only one represents demand you can meet again.

Record the date the run went live and the date the last piece went. If a design took most of a year to clear, reprinting it means committing to another year of it sitting there, and that stock is doing nothing while it waits.

Ignore the Launch Week

This is the piece most people miss. The first week of any drop measures loyalty, not demand. Your regulars buy because you launched something, more or less regardless of what it is. That spike will happen for a strong design and a weak one alike.

The interesting question is what happened afterwards. Look at weeks three to eight, when the audience buying is people who saw it cold and decided they wanted it. A design that kept ticking over after the launch noise died down is a reprint. A design that stopped dead the moment the launch email stopped working is not, however good the first week looked.

“"Launch week measures how much people like you. Week five measures how much they like the design."”

Leftovers Are a Size Instruction

The sizes still sitting in the box are the most direct advice you will get about the next order. If small consistently lingers and extra large consistently sells out, the fix is not a better design, it is a better curve.

Because the minimum is fifty pieces per order with sizes mixed freely rather than fifty per size, you are free to order the curve you actually sold. There is no obligation to buy an even spread, and doing so is how brands accumulate a permanent shelf of unsold extremes.

• Calculate sell through per size, not just for the design as a whole.
• Record how long the run took to clear and which sizes went first.
• Discount the launch week when judging demand, and look at what sold after it.
• Set the reprint curve from what sold, not from the curve you originally bought.
• Note any sizes people asked for that you never stocked, because that demand is invisible in your sales data.

Reprint the Design, Reconsider the Garment

A design that worked on a hoodie will not automatically work on a tee. Scale, placement and print method all shift, and a chest graphic sized for fleece can look oversized on a lighter jersey. Treat the design as the asset and the garment as a separate decision each time.

Colour is worth revisiting too. Reprinting a proven design in a second colourway is one of the lowest risk moves available, because the design is already validated and only one variable has changed.

When Not to Reprint at All

Sometimes the right answer is to let it go even though the numbers look fine. If you called it a limited run, reprinting breaks a promise and costs you more in goodwill than the run earns. If the design is tied to a date or an event that has passed, its moment has gone. And if you are honestly bored of it, that will show in how you sell it.

Retiring a good design deliberately is a legitimate decision. Retiring it by accident, because you never got round to reordering and it drifted out of stock for four months, is not.