Retailers Scrambling for Inventory

November 06, 2009

Question? When a retailer ‘scrambles’ to chase fast selling apparel where does she scramble to? This is the greatest opportunity for ‘proximity’ apparel factories in recent decades. Its like they say, three things can happen when you pass a football and two of them are bad. Same in retail when you put inventory on the sales room floor. You can sell it at full profit; you can sell out of it and miss that revenue completely (stockout); or you can not give it away and you make nothing (markdown). Now, the problem is stockouts. Factory-direct replenishment fixes that.

If you are a serious, super-compliant, short run, fast turn apparel factory anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, how are ‘retailers’, whoever they are, going to find you? Make no mistake, this is the most serious issue the American apparel industry faces. It is just as hard to find a good factory as it has ever been (unless they are logging onto aapnetwork.net of course) because most factories don’t market, don’t join, don’t show up, don’t create content about themselves, don’t even know how to define their competitive edge or real value.

Well, we’re working on fixing this on a far more global scale. We’ve exchanged emails with our Board of Directors madly all week. We just hung up with Panjiva. And the best thing, we’re meeting in an invitation-only, retail/brand-only, Senior Sourcing-only roomful of executives November 17 in NY to learn from them what they need to know to get to work with you, our members. And then we start a countdown to our annual meeting May 2-4 in Miami which is going to have the most important and definitive agenda in the US apparel industry next year – defining, integrating, setting standards and centralizing information on balanced sourcing; risk assessment; social responsibility; factory selection; strategic sourcing; and best practices from the leading factories of the Western Hemisphere.

This isn’t a meeting for hand wringers and do gooders and students and start ups and lobbies and resisters to change. This isn’t about having good laws, its about making money. This is proactive, serious Top 100, Corporate strategic thinking because sourcing has reached its time and we can help.

Who else is doing this? Nobody. We do this because our motto here is “blame nobody, expect nothing, do something.” It segues perfectly to another saying a member sent me yesterday morning, “'I must do something' always solves more problems than 'Something must be done'.”

We must do something...........its about jobs up and down the chain, here in the US and in the hemisphere, that give us safety and security, creates wealth, raises the standard of living, and stops despots from selling their countries out to the ‘Left.’ We found a great saying that says it all, “nothing stops a bullet like a job.” Take your pick – bullets or jobs. THAT is social responsibility on steroids and brands/retailers are big enough to take responsibility for the choice, with a spectacular direct impact on the societies of every one of us. Its time to show the industry how to do this.

Its time for each of us to come together and do this, because its really something our future depends upon.........

Tags: retail , inventory

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