Modern Fashion Supply Chain Pt.4
From the article regarding the modern fashion supply chain, now we will discuss it in the next chapter! Get ready to write it down in your book! (If you haven’t read the last article you can check it right here!)
CHAPTER 4: Fashion Demand Forecasting within a Modern Fashion Supply Chain
Every fashion brand has a perspective on what people want to wear. The label’s original designs and prints try to live up to those expectations. However, apart from sticking to that unique vision, much of the work that fashion brands do to succeed season after season and year over year involves a practice called fashion forecasting. According to fashion, forecasting is “the prediction of consumer moods, behavior, and buying habits.” Fashion forecasting requires fashion buyers and manufacturers to research not only emerging clothing trends, but also global patterns and events that can help or hurt their customers and their brand efforts in sourcing fabrics, connecting with manufacturers, or moving products from point A to point B. .
Accurately forecasted demand can increase customer satisfaction, reduce stockouts, efficient production and more informed pricing.
Fashion demand forecasting is an imperfect science, but when executed well, it provides established and emerging fashion brands an important foundation for everything from design, production, fashion logistics, to marketing and promotion.
Fashion Demand Forecasting Challenge
No matter how much preparation and analysis a fashion designer does, fashion demand forecasting will always involve some errors. It is basically similar to fortune-telling, so keep your predictions careful and realistic.
Most major fashion retailers and brands have fully dedicated departments and staff to analyze trends, both in real time and from past seasons, to make clearer and more accurate forecasts. One of the reasons why fashion demand forecasting is challenging is because garment sales have a habit of converging sporadically at different points in a calendar year, sometimes predictably and sometimes not. This is largely due to easily observable factors, including:
- A large number of potential buyers in a given retail market.
- The varying fashion tastes of current and potential buyers.
- Great variety and low regularity of customer product requests.
While these three elements have historically caused uncertainty in fashion predictions, they are not the only things to do so. In the past 20 years, shifts in global customer and workforce preferences and climatic conditions have further complicated fashion demand forecasting. Now clothing brands also have to compete with:
Democratization of Apparel Procurement and Retail
While starting your own clothing line or building a new apparel product into an existing one still requires significant commitment and investment, there are now more resources available to help new fashion designers and young retailers to start fashion businesses. From online garment manufacturers and wholesale directories, to shoppable Instagram posts, budding fashion businesses no longer need massive retail resources to successfully source, market, and sell clothing.
A Booming Niche Fashion Ecosystem
Modern fashion has been segmented into micro-communities at an almost viral pace. The niche fashion market is growing rapidly, in particular, thanks to the increasing weight of the fashion influencer community. While this offers fashion buyers and customers a richer product environment and a more diverse product selection, it makes mass production and sourcing more challenging for department stores and larger retailers, who are focused on forecasting for a broad mass market.
New Complications for Season-Based Forecasting
In recent years, the reality of climate change has made it more difficult for fashion brands to produce and receive clothing on schedule, accurately predict weather-based fashion trends, and prevent fashion image fatigue. For a fashion brand like Gucci, COVID-19 provides the final say, deciding the ballot in a long debate about whether or not to go seasonless.
Growing Customer Demand for Supply Chain Transparency
As movements like #WhoMadeMyClothes gain momentum, fashion brands must consider the extent to which they will adopt and market their labels’ supply chain transparency. They must identify the evidence of transparency their customers are looking for, and plan their inventory keeping in mind how best to capture and present that product story during forecasting, design, sourcing, sampling, and production.
It doesn’t just stop there, you should also know how to Use Data for Fashion Demand Forecasting and How Modern Fashion Supply Chains Facilitate Clothing Inventory Planning