Reordering Stock: The Rhythm That Gets a Brand to Year Two
By The Velocity Wear Team
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Reordering is a rhythm rather than a decision, and brands that treat it as a decision spend their whole life either out of stock or over-stocked. The fix is arithmetic you can do on the back of an envelope, once you know which three numbers go into it.
Your reorder point
It is the stock level at which you must place the next order to avoid running out: your daily sales rate multiplied by your total lead time, plus a buffer.
Total lead time is the number everyone under-counts. It is not just production. It is the time to finalise anything outstanding, plus 10 to 15 working days of production from artwork approval, plus freight, plus customs, plus receiving and putting away. For a UK brand importing, the honest total is several weeks even when nothing goes wrong.
So a design selling two a day with a six-week chain needs reordering at around eighty-four units plus buffer. Most brands reorder at fifty and then spend a month out of stock wondering what happened.
Reading sell-through early
Sell-through — the proportion of a run sold in a period — is the most useful number a small brand has. Track it per design and per size rather than in aggregate, because an overall 60% can conceal a design that cleared its mediums in a fortnight and never moved an XL.
The shape matters more than the number. A design that sold half its run in week one and nothing since had a launch, not a business. A design selling steadily at a lower rate is the one to reorder, because its demand does not depend on an announcement.
What to change, and what not to
- Change the size curve. That is the main thing a reorder is for — your first order was a forecast and the reorder should reflect what actually sold.
- Change the quantity, in proportion to evidence. Stepped, not leaped.
- Do not change the garment. Switching blank, fit or print method on a repeat means returning customers receive a different product from the one they recommended, which is the quiet way to lose them.
- Consider a second colourway of a proven design, which is a much safer bet than an unproven new design and reads to customers as a new product.
The seductive big reorder
A design sells out, it feels excellent, and the temptation is to reorder at five times the quantity and drop a pricing tier. Sometimes right. Often not, because speed of sell-out measures the size of the run at least as much as the size of the market. A design that cleared 50 pieces in a week has not demonstrated it will clear 500.
Step up. Fifty to a hundred is evidence-led. Fifty to a thousand is a different bet wearing the costume of a reorder.
Put it in the diary
The single most effective change most small brands can make is to review stock on a fixed day each week rather than when something feels low. Fifteen minutes, every Monday, each design checked against its reorder point.
It is dull and it eliminates the commonest inventory failure there is, which is not having noticed in time. Everything else in this article is refinement; the calendar entry is the part that works.
