In the fast-paced world of fashion retail, time is more than just money—it's opportunity, especially when planning mid-season sales or end-of-season discounts.
The longer your team analyzes products and manually adjusts prices, the more you risk missing crucial sales windows and leaving profits on the table. We have all seen merchandise planners spend hours, sometimes days, pouring over complex Excel spreadsheets and running endless calculations to find the optimal markdown strategy.
But what if you could cut that process time by 80%?
Enter AI-powered markdown tools such as Markmi. These intelligent solutions transform how fashion retailers manage end-of-season sales, helping teams make faster, more confident pricing decisions without getting bogged down in manual work.
Take G-Star EU's Summer 2023 season, for example: Using Markmi, the team analyzed nearly 1900 products in just five days and performed over 14 million calculations—all in under 10 minutes per strategy.
In this blog post, we'll dive into how an AI-driven tool like Markmi saves crucial time for fashion retail teams, letting them focus on what really matters: hitting sales targets and protecting margins.
Fashion retail is a fast-moving industry where the ability to respond quickly to sales performance can make or break a season. Yet, despite the speed needed, many merchandise planners and heads of commerce still rely on manual processes to manage markdowns. These outdated methods consume valuable time and resources, slowing down decision-making when speed is critical.
Take, for example, a typical merchandise planner preparing for the summer sales season. Each week, they spend hours combing through spreadsheets, manually calculating discounts, reviewing product performance, and aligning pricing with sales goals.
According to a conversation with a +70M annual revenue fashion retail team, one planner revealed that they spend an average of 8 hours per week during the sales season reviewing markdowns for their entire product range. This involves cross-referencing data, calculating sell-through rates, and ensuring that margins remain protected—tasks that are necessary but far from strategic.
This manual approach doesn't just eat into time; it also increases the risk of human error. With hundreds or even thousands of SKUs to manage, it's easy to overlook critical insights or miscalculate the impact of markdowns on margins and inventory levels. Plus, the market conditions may have shifted by the time the data has been processed, leaving your team a step behind.
The result? Hours lost in repetitive, low-value tasks, and a markdown process that is reactive rather than proactive. This impacts the ability to hit sales targets and drains the team's capacity to focus on more strategic, high-level initiatives. In today's competitive retail environment, that's a cost that fashion retailers simply can't afford.
One of the best ways to illustrate how AI-powered markdown tools can save time and effort is by looking at real-world examples. During G-Star EU's Summer Season '23, their team faced the task of managing markdowns for 1,866 products as fast as possible.
In the traditional approach, a merchandise planner would need to manually review each product's performance, calculate sell-through rates, and align price adjustments with sales goals. This process could take days, if not weeks.
However, with an AI-powered markdown tool like Markmi, the process was dramatically streamlined. In just 5 days, the tool performed 14.5 million calculations, running through 21 unique scenarios to generate the most optimal markdown strategies. This level of analysis would have been impossible to achieve manually in such a short period.
For each individual pricing strategy—configured with 3 phases—the system performed 3.2 million calculations in under 10 minutes. When running 5 different strategies, that number skyrocketed to 16 million calculations, all completed in minutes rather than hours.
The result? G-Star's team was able to test multiple markdown strategies, each factoring in variables such as inventory levels, sales velocity, and margin protection, without having to spend days or even weeks analyzing each scenario manually. This saved them significant time and ensured they could confidently implement markdowns that maximized revenue while minimizing excess inventory.
So, the real value of an AI-powered markdown tool isn't just in the speed of calculations—it's in the time saved for merchandisers. Traditional manual processes often consume hours of a planner's day, time that could be better spent on strategic decision-making rather than sifting through spreadsheets and performing repetitive calculations.
As we've seen in our conversation with a +70M annual revenue fashion retail client, a typical merchandise planner spends an average of 8 hours per week manually reviewing product performance, calculating sell-through rates, and determining the appropriate discounts using Excel. Over the course of a season, this adds up to days lost on routine tasks that are essential but not necessarily high-value.
However, the same work can be completed in just 1 hour with an AI-powered markdown tool like Markmi. That's an 80% reduction in time spent on markdown processes.
The AI handles the heavy lifting—analyzing vast amounts of data, running millions of calculations, and presenting the planner with ready-made recommendations for markdowns optimized for sales velocity and margin protection.
This time savings allows merchandisers to focus on higher-level tasks, such as refining strategies, collaborating with colleagues, and ensuring that markdowns align with broader business goals. They can become more proactive and strategic instead of being bogged down by manual analysis.
Can a tool that fundamentally improves and speeds up your fashion retail markdown process still be considered a mere 'nice-to-have' in today's fashion reality?
The faster your team can analyze data, create markdown strategies, and implement them, the more agile and responsive your business becomes. More scenarios, more confident decision-making! So, in essence, an AI tool like Markmi saves time by combining the following traits.
Multiple scenarios and automated calculations at scale.
Markmi handles different scenarios and, therefore, millions of calculations in minutes, processing vast amounts of product data to generate tailored markdown recommendations. What used to take hours of manual spreadsheet analysis can now be completed in less than 10 minutes, as described in the case of G-Star EU, where the tool handled 16 million calculations for 5 different strategies in just minutes.
Immediate insights enable quick back-and-forth decision-making.
An AI assistant like Markmi provides merchandisers with clear, actionable insights on how each markdown will impact key metrics like sales, inventory, and margins. With these insights, the team can discuss with decision-makers higher up the chain quickly and confidently, leading to swift execution. This shift from reactive to proactive markdown management is what gives innovative fashion retailers the edge in today's fast-paced market.
Seamless integration with your ERP.
Once a markdown strategy is approved, Markmi can seamlessly integrate with your ERP system, ensuring that the markdowns are executed without delay. This integration reduces friction and accelerates the path from decision to action, allowing your team to respond to market conditions in near real-time.
In fashion retail, speed and precision are the name of the game. The longer it takes to decide on markdown pricing, the more potential revenue is lost and the higher the risk of getting stuck with excess inventory that requires even deeper discounting.
AI-powered markdown tools like Markmi are changing that dynamic. By automating time-consuming calculations, providing data-driven recommendations, and integrating seamlessly with your ERP system, these tools allow fashion merchandisers to cut markdown process times by up to 80%, as demonstrated above.
What once took hours or more per week can now be done in a little over 1 hour, freeing up valuable time for more strategic tasks. Moreover, the ability to quickly generate multiple scenarios and approve markdowns with the click of a few buttons means that fashion retailers can stay agile, respond to trends faster, and protect their margins.
The result is not just faster markdowns—it's smarter, more profitable decisions that keep your business ahead of the competition. It's time to stop relying on outdated spreadsheets and start embracing the future of fashion retail.
Get in touch to learn more!