How to Forecast Apparel Demand Without Overordering

Forecast apparel demand from two numbers: how many people join each year, and how often each garment gets replaced. Headcount tells you the size of your first order and almost nothing about the ones after it. Once a programme is running, your annual volume is joiners multiplied by their initial issue, plus existing staff multiplied by the replacement rate, and the rest is noise.

Start With Leavers, Not Headcount

A team of 200 people does not need 200 garments a year. It needs enough for whoever joined, plus enough to replace what wore out. If your annual churn is meaningful, the joiner figure will dominate everything else in the forecast, and it is a number your HR system already holds. Pull the last two or three years of starters by month and you have the backbone of the plan.

Do not count returned kit as recoverable stock unless you have actually inspected some. Polos and tees tend to come back unusable. Softshells, fleeces and heavy outerwear often do not, and those are the expensive items, so it is worth checking them properly rather than assuming either way.

The Two Numbers That Drive Everything Else

Joiner rate sets your new-issue volume. Replacement cycle sets your reissue volume. Get both roughly right and the forecast will be close enough to plan against. Get either badly wrong and no amount of spreadsheet sophistication rescues it.

Replacement cycle is the one people guess at. Rather than guessing, ask a supervisor at your hardest-wearing site how long a polo lasts before it looks wrong on shift. That answer, not a policy document, is your real cycle.

Setting a Replacement Cycle You Can Defend

A replacement cycle is a promise to your staff and a constraint on your budget, so write it per garment rather than per person. A hi-vis vest and an embroidered softshell do not wear at the same rate and should not share a rule. Front-of-house polos in a busy venue may need replacing annually. The same polo in an office role might last three years and still look presentable.

Publish the cycle. When people know a replacement is due in month eleven, they stop making informal requests in month four, and unplanned reorder volume falls on its own.

Size Curves Move Slower Than People Expect

Once you have issued kit to a reasonable number of people, your size distribution is stable enough to reuse. New joiners in the same roles at the same sites tend to fall into roughly the same spread. That means you can order against last year's curve rather than waiting to collect every individual size before you commit, which is usually what delays an order by a month.

The exception is a site with a genuinely different workforce profile. A new distribution centre will not mirror the size spread of your head office, so treat it as a fresh collection rather than an extrapolation.

“"Forecasting uniform is not predicting the future. It is noticing that last year already happened."”

Build the Forecast as a Calendar

A single annual total is not a forecast, it is a budget line. What you need is when the volume lands. If two thirds of your joiners start in September, the ordering decision sits in July, because production begins at artwork approval and typically runs around 10 to 15 working days for screen printing and embroidery, with tracked UK delivery usually 2 to 5 working days after dispatch. Map the demand months first, then work backwards to the order months.

How Much Buffer Stock Is Sensible

Some buffer is worth holding, because the alternative is a new starter in their own clothes for three weeks. Too much buffer is money sitting in a cupboard in sizes nobody asked for.

• Hold buffer only in your three or four most common sizes. Buffer in XS and 3XL rarely moves and is the stock that ends up written off.
• Buffer the garments a new starter cannot work without, not the full issue. A polo and a fleece will do; the branded gilet can wait for the next run.
• Set a reorder trigger rather than a review date. When buffer drops below a set number, it joins the next run automatically.
• Keep buffer at the site that issues it, unless you genuinely have someone whose job is shipping garments internally.
• Review buffer against actual withdrawals once a year and cut any size that has not moved.

Consolidate Runs Rather Than Chasing Precision

There is a point where forecasting more accurately stops paying and consolidating better starts paying. Velocity Wear works from a 50-piece minimum per order with sizes mixed freely within the run, and bulk discounts reach up to around 35% as quantities rise. Two departments ordering 40 pieces each in the same week are giving that up for no reason other than that nobody asked them to combine.

The free instant price calculator is useful here precisely because it is live. You can test whether pulling a quarter's demand forward into one run is worth it before you go and persuade three managers to agree to it.

Check the Forecast Against What Happened

At the end of the year, compare what you ordered with what was issued. The gap tells you which assumption was wrong: stock left over means your replacement cycle is too aggressive, while constant unplanned reorders mean it is too slow. One hour of this review is worth more than any amount of upfront modelling.