Creativity built the brand. Operations decide whether it lasts.

We work with apparel and fashion businesses on the unglamorous half — the systems, processes, people and cash that turn a good season into a durable company.

The problem

Every department is succeeding. The company is not.

Design hit the drop date. Sales booked the order. Production shipped the goods. Finance closed the month. Everyone reports a win, and yet margin leaked, the reorder was late, and a retailer took a deduction nobody can explain.

That is what happens when each function measures its own piece rather than the outcome. An order is not complete when it ships. It is complete when it is shipped, invoiced and paid.

The failure is almost never one team being bad at its job. It is four teams holding four different definitions of success, and four versions of the numbers to prove it.

Creativity without discipline creates excess inventory. Discipline without creativity creates a company customers stop caring about.

The brands that last hold both. That balance is what we are hired to build.

What we look for

The signals that a business has outgrown how it runs.

Competing spreadsheets

Finance, ops and sales each hold a different inventory number, and meetings are spent reconciling rather than deciding.

Heroics as process

The season only closes because two people stayed late. Nothing is documented, and nothing scales.

Problems surfacing late

Delays, shortages and compliance failures are discovered by the retailer before they are discovered internally.

Deductions absorbed

Chargebacks are written off as a cost of doing business because nobody has traced them to a cause.

Systems that disagree

The ERP, the warehouse and the sales channel each tell a different story and no one is sure which to trust.

Cash tight in a good season

The business sold well and still ran short, because growth consumed cash before it produced it.

What we advise on

Five things decide whether an apparel business scales or stalls.

Right people

Structure, roles and clear ownership sized to the volume you are doing now — and fluency with the tools that remove work.

Right processes

Order-to-cash as it genuinely runs, with automation taking steps out rather than adding checkpoints.

Right systems

ERP, EDI, WMS and OMS chosen against your real order patterns, producing numbers the whole business agrees on.

Right capital

Factoring, financing and collections structured to a season, because growth consumes cash before it produces it.

Right vendors

Logistics providers, EDI partners, factors and implementers selected on evidence and held to the scope they sold.

How we work

We come back and prove the fix held.

Engagements run as a loop rather than a project. We baseline the numbers, trace problems to root cause, sequence the fixes, put a monitoring plan behind each one, then re-measure against the original baseline.

That last step is the one most advisory work skips. It is also the only way either of us finds out whether the work was worth what you paid for it.

We will not put you on a system that does not fit. If the right answer for your operation is a competitor's product, or keeping what you already have, that is what we will tell you.

Tell us where it's breaking.

Book a short call and describe the problem in your own words. We will tell you whether we can help, what it would involve, and if it is not a fit we will say so.

Book a call

Built on apparel experience

Our work is grounded in decades inside the apparel industry, concentrated in California and New York, where most of the country's wholesale apparel business actually runs. We have seen how showroom orders, retailer mandates, and production calendars collide, and what it takes to keep that collision from costing you margin.

Resources

Start with the guides.

Most of what we know is published free. These are the same analyses we run inside paid engagements, minus your specific numbers.

Apparel ERP software: a buyer's guide

Apparel-specific versus general-purpose systems, built-in EDI versus middleware, and the scorecard that actually decides a selection.

Read the guide
How to choose an EDI provider for apparel wholesale

What EDI is and why retailers require it, built in or third-party, what Nordstrom and Saks require, and what it really costs.

Read the guide
Inventory and production software for brands that manufacture

Shopify, wholesale, work-in-progress production and QuickBooks in one stack. Manufacturing-first platforms compared with apparel systems.

Read the guide
Free tools

Calculators and templates you can use today.

No sign-up. The calculators run right in your browser, and each one comes with a plain-English guide to the numbers.

Sell-through rate calculator

Sell-through to date, weeks of supply, and the weekly sales you need to hit your target.

Open the calculator
Open to buy calculator

Plan six months of sales, markdowns and inventory, and see what you can still buy.

Open the calculator
Keystone pricing calculator

Price from landed cost up or from the shelf price down, and see what a markdown does to margin.

Open the calculator
Landed cost calculator

Factory price plus duty, freight and fees, so you know what each unit really cost.

Open the calculator
SSCC calculator and GS1-128 label guide

Create SSCCs with correct check digits for carton labels, or check one you already have.

Open the calculator
Sourcing transit times by country

How long goods take to reach your warehouse from each sourcing country, and when to place the order.

Open the calculator
Tech pack template (Excel)

BOM, graded specs, construction, a size and UPC matrix, and costing in one workbook.

Get the template
Software vendor scorecard

Compare ERP, EDI and inventory vendors on the same weighted criteria.

Use the scorecard
EDI transaction codes list

Every X12 document an apparel brand is likely to see, with guides to the 850, 855, 856, 810, 846, 860 and 997.

See the list