Four near-identical grey jumpers went into a range. Between them, they sold through at around 50%. A fifth jumper, distinct enough to actually mean something to a customer, sold through at 95%. Nobody chose to over-range on purpose. It happened one “just in case” decision at a time, made by different people, none of whom could see the other three jumpers on someone else’s plan.
By the time the sell-through numbers came in, the damage was already six to twelve months old. That’s the real sting of this problem: it’s invisible at the point it’s created and expensive by the time it’s visible.
It’s not really a buying problem
It’s tempting to file this under buying, and it does show up there most visibly, because a range is where the overlap finally becomes countable. But the underlying issue isn’t specific to buying at all. It’s a visibility problem that happens to be most expensive in buying, because that’s the point where a lack of a shared, cross-functional view turns directly into cash tied up in stock nobody needed four versions of.
Buying happens category by category, person by person, each doing a good job within their own patch. The person buying jumper A doesn’t see jumper B, C and D landing in adjacent categories with the same silhouette and a marginally different neckline. Each decision looks sound in isolation. The overlap only exists in aggregate, and aggregate is exactly the view nobody’s job description covers.
The catch-22 that keeps it unfixed
We speak to brands all the time, and a lot of the teams we’ve worked with over the years have an extremely stretched buying and merchandising function - stretched enough that there’s no real capacity to try new processes, test new tools, or even take a call from a tech partner who might help.
That’s the trap. The fix for this kind of visibility gap is usually more visibility - a shared view across categories, checked before commitment, not after. Building that shared view takes time from a team that’s already too busy dealing with the consequences of not having it. They’re too stretched to fix the thing that’s causing the stretch, which is about as complete a catch-22 as operations gets.
Six to twelve months of lead time
The uncomfortable part of this pattern is the lag. A range that’s about to over-index on similar products doesn’t announce itself until sell-through data comes in, by which point the buy has already happened, and the stock is already committed. Catching this requires looking earlier than feels necessary - at the point products are being selected, not the point they’re being marked down.
Brands who catch it early do noticeably better, and the reason is almost always the same: the conversation happened at the right moment, not the convenient one. A five-minute check before four teams each commit to their version of a jumper is a very different exercise to a post-mortem after the sell-through report lands.
The fix costs less than the markdown
A structured range review, done early enough to change a buy rather than just explain it afterwards, is cheap compared to the alternative: several products competing for the same customer, most of them destined for a discount rail - or a pallet heading to a clearance retailer - regardless of how good any individual buyer’s instincts were.
Nobody plans to over-range. They just don’t notice they’re doing it until the sales report says so, months too late to do anything but discount.
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