The fashion industry cannot plan for what its brands and buyers cannot see. What retailers can see, however, is the blind spot driving such siloes.
Worldwide inventory distortion—comprising $1.2 trillion in out-of-stocks and $562 billion in overstocks, according to IHL Group—is projected to cost retailers $1.77 trillion in 2023, the global retail research and advisory firm found.
On one hand, retailers are trying to balance complex, multichannel customer experiences with internal operational limitations. On the other hand, fragmented data forces planners to rely on manual, inaccurate spreadsheets, leading to costly stockouts and overbuying.
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As omnichannel operations collide with siloed systems, 70 percent of retail executives cited a lack of real-time, comprehensive product data as a top barrier to profitability, based on research from Periscope by McKinsey—forcing them to make blind purchasing decisions that erode margins by up to 10 percent annually, according to the global firm’s technology backbone.
Friction aside, specialty stores and mom-and-pop shops are rapidly retaining market share. One company’s transaction data showed that independent retailers gained a quarter of the sector’s share over the past five years, rising from 49 percent to 62 percent of total transaction volume.
And now, that company has a solution to the sector’s slanted sourcing situation.
Joor has launched a feature that lets retailers see and manage their seasonal assortment in one place, with product details and delivery timelines. The wholesale fashion management ecosystem comprises over 14,000 brands and 675,000 curated fashion buyers across 150 countries—with a transaction volume exceeding $20 billion annually.
It’s a big platform. To make it easier for retailers to centralize their complete collections, the Big Apple-born business has rolled out Joor Visual Assortment; the idea is that users can spot merchandising gaps—and opportunities—with better visibility into incoming inventory.
“Joor’s Visual Assortment feature is set to revolutionize wholesale buying by enabling fashion retailers, particularly in the growing independent retailer community—to visualize and analyze their entire seasonal assortment in one place in order to optimize their buy and better manage their business,” said CEO Kristin Savilia.
Joor defined visual assortment tools as what buyers use to organize styles into vision boards that “mirror how they think about the season;” However, it’s a relatively fragmented endeavor that lends itself to headaches like inaccurate purchases and product duplicates—not to mention the hours lost while manually documenting each season’s product assortment—inefficiently curated or not.
Wordplay aside, 86 percent of retailers reported that they lack a tool to see their full assortment in one place, per Joor survey data. Its proprietary planner, then, aims to replace the traditionally tedious, labor-intensive methods for aggregating seasonal assortments across brands. How? By simplifying the end-to-end buying process.
It works like this: Joor Visual Assortment aims to give fashion buyers a single view of their seasonal purchases and potential orders. The tool lets retailers visualize and analyze their total assortment in a single interface, then sort and filter by variables such as brand, delivery date, style and color. Using an algorithm to categorize-and-standardize, rendering the full product buy organized and comparable to pull in a buyer’s assortment—even if the orders weren’t placed on Joor.
“Our mission is to listen to the needs of brands and retailers and develop innovative solutions to industry challenges,” Savilia said. “As a former buyer myself, I recognize how critical it is to have a clear understanding of a store’s purchases and upcoming deliveries.”
The wholesale planning tool was designed with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and mid-market retailers in mind—not just big luxury. Early testers of its Visual Assortment tool responded positively, per the global platform, with 92 percent of retailers in a trial citing time savings and clearer assortment visibility. The digital showroom is also pairing the tool with a Shopify integration that pushes order data into the e-commerce platform to cut manual entry.
North Carolinian indie retailer Mary Jane’s Clothing Store said the visual-first solution has been a “game-changer” for the brick-and-mortar in Concord and its buying process.
“It makes building and organizing assortments incredibly intuitive—allowing us to see the full collection visually and make smarter, more confident decisions,” per the boutique, which was founded by best friends Amy and Ashlyn and named, respectively, after their mothers. “It’s especially helpful for planning buys across categories and price points.”
Another client—a Chicago-based womenswear retailer, Maxine—is rather transfixed with the tool.
“I have been obsessed with utilizing Joor’s Visual Assortment and have been wanting to have this type of software for years,” she said. “I love being able to plan out what each delivery is going to look like visually and also decrease repetitive purchasing.”
Given that Joor’s latest market survey found that 52 percent of brand respondents reported wholesale as the most profitable distribution channel, the wholesale planning tool is being positioned as part of Joor’s growing retail enablement product suite. Over the summer, Joor developed a first-of-its-kind digital show to marry brands with ATS inventory, developed to address the evolving needs of the industry’s retail landscape.
To cover the entire buying season, all retailers will receive complimentary access to Visual Assortment for 90 days.
