Reading Sell-Through Before You Reorder

Sell-through percentages look decisive until you sit with a planner who has lived through two mismatched seasons. A subclass that moves quickly in one district may stall in another, and a single promotional weekend can inflate a figure that will not repeat.

Before reordering, we ask teams to pair sell-through with weeks of supply, aged units still on the floor, and the remaining runway of the season. That combination usually reveals whether the buy was truly light or simply concentrated in a few stores.

In practice, the strongest reorder conversations start with a short visual: bars for units sold, a line for remaining inventory, and a note on planned markdowns. The chart does not replace judgment; it keeps the committee from arguing about different mental pictures of the same numbers.

If your next buy depends on last month's spikes, take an afternoon to rebuild the story by store cluster. The reorder that follows tends to be quieter — and closer to what the floor can actually carry.