Apparel Inventory Forecasting

Baseline demand

For core styles, start with units sold per week over the last few months, by size. Adjust for weeks where a size was out of stock, because sales stopped for lack of stock, not lack of demand.

Spikes

For drops and promos, look at comparable past events: how many orders arrived on day one, how many in the first week, and how quickly each size sold. An audience that has grown since the last drop will usually buy more, so note follower and email list growth alongside the sales history.

Seasonality

Surf brands rise into spring and summer. Outerwear and fleece rise into fall and the holidays. Every brand has its own pattern, so use your own history. See surf apparel seasonality.

Lead times

Work backward from the date stock must be sellable: production time, freight, port and customs, delivery to the warehouse, and receiving. At OC3PL, labeled inbound with an ASN is received and slotted within one business day. Freight is the part that slips, so build in room.

Your production forecast and your warehouse forecast are related but not the same. The warehouse needs to know what is arriving and what is leaving, by day and week.

Send it at least a week before a drop, earlier for bigger events, and update it as you learn more. For a drop timeline, see apparel drop fulfillment.

It will be wrong sometimes. The question is how quickly you find out and what you can do about it.

• Watch inventory by size daily during a drop. Your dashboard shows it by SKU.
• If a drop is selling faster than forecast, call your account manager. They are on site and can move labor while the drop is live.
• If a style is selling slower, decide early whether to promote it, bundle it, or hold the rest for a later moment. See dead stock.
• After every event, compare forecast with actual by size and by day. That comparison is the most valuable input to the next forecast.

One apparel brand on our results page grew from 500 to 5,000 orders a day over two years and moved into big-box retail without changing warehouses. Growth like that is only manageable when the brand and the warehouse share the plan.

Brands at a thousand to a few thousand orders a month rarely need a dedicated planning system. A shared spreadsheet with weekly units by style and size, inbound dates and event dates covers most of it, as long as someone owns it and updates it every week. As the catalog and channels grow, inventory planning apps that read from your store and warehouse data save time.

Whatever the tool, the habit that matters is the weekly conversation: what sold, what is arriving, what is coming up. At OC3PL that conversation is with a person who works in the same building as your inventory. We are here. We got you.