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“Is it finally getting colder?” It’s a question I’ve heard a lot in fashion retail these past few weeks. A warm autumn is lovely when you’re outside. It’s less lovely when winter coats are already in store. Retailers are asking how to plan for seasons that no longer follow the familiar calendar. So my colleagues and I looked at sales, stock, markdowns and weather data from fashion retailers. What I found most interesting was the difference between winter and summer. Winter products, such as coats, knitwear and scarves, sold 21% more slowly in warm than in cold autumn weeks. We found no reliable January catch-up. Waiting for winter to rescue a slow start is a risky plan when the full-price window is already closing. Summer tells a different story. In warm spring weeks, summer products sold about 35% faster than in cold weeks, without a clear drop later in the season. If a bestseller takes off and your supplier can deliver in time, there may be room to buy more. Summer products also delivered more gross margin per euro of stock than both winter and non-seasonal products in our sample. These findings call for different buying decisions in summer and winter. That’s what we explore in our new report, Beyond the Retail Calendar. It also includes six questions for your next buying meeting. Interested? Request the full report here: https://lnkd.in/e-34QADG Or send me a message here on LinkedIn!

Happy New Year to all the merchandise planners and buyers out there! We toasted to the new year at the office this week. It is September, but nobody got the date wrong. In fashion, next year is already being decided. Budgets for 2027 are on the table right now. The budget you create already sets what you are able to order for next autumn, and also how much of it you will be marking down by this time next year. By the time the market posts its actual New Year's message, most of that money is committed. That gap is the reason Thunderstock exists. Retailers celebrate the year in January and start planning it in March, while the teams who outperform made their calls in September. So we toasted early, fortune cookies included. Good fortune starts with a good forecast! If your 2027 budget is still a blank sheet, start with our Strategy module. And if you only have fifteen minutes, that is one of our three demo options. Start getting ahead of time now 👉 https://buff.ly/T7DgiKb

Excited to share that Thunderstock has officially partnered with Eazier by ACA. 🤝 We’ve known the people behind ACA for quite some time, and over the past period we’ve taken that relationship a big step further: the full technical integration is now in place and already being used by several of our shared retail clients. The integration covers the complete flow between Eazier and Thunderstock, including: • Full historical data synchronization • Daily exports of stock, sales and pricing mutations • Fully automated imports for (pre)allocation, replenishment and purchase orders The result is a seamless connection between ERP and inventory optimization, with less manual work and a much stronger foundation for automated decision-making. A big thanks to Carel Smulders for bringing the partnership together, and to Nils van Keulen and his team for all the work on executing and completing the integrations. Great to have this officially in place and looking forward to helping more fashion retailers get the most out of the combination of Eazier and Thunderstock. ⚡

There’s almost a sense of pride in manual inventory management. And I get it, I used to love building complex Excel sheets myself as well. It feels like control. But in reality, many retail teams are spending huge amounts of time trying to manage complexity, while reacting too late to what’s actually happening in stores and online. No one knows the business better than the merchandisers, planners and buyers themselves. So the idea that a machine could suddenly make better decisions often feels unrealistic. But that’s not what AI-driven inventory management should be about. At Thunderstock, we see technology as support for human expertise, not as a replacement for it. Of course, roles will change. A lot of administrative work and standardized workflows can be automated, giving teams more time to focus on commercial strategy, competitors, customer behavior and finding the next bestseller. The strongest results come from combining retail knowledge with algorithms that can process far more data, patterns and exceptions than any team could manually manage. A few things that are important to us: ✅ Every retailer has their own patterns, strategy and way of working. Models are trained on their own data, not generic retail assumptions. ✅ Data quality matters. Validation layers and AI checks help detect mismatches, missing data and unexpected shifts before they impact decisions. ✅ Forecasting should not become a black box. Accuracy matters, but so do explainability and control. ✅ Business rules are essential. They make it possible to create a personalized stock strategy and steer differently by product group, store type or lifecycle stage. The goal is not less human involvement. The goal is better decisions, with more focus on where people truly add value.

Proud to see our clients achieving such huge improvements in their stock management! Our modules cover every stage in the stock management cycle, so retailers can harness our proven AI technologies to manage and optimize it all (or just one part). From Strategy and Buying to Logistics, Pricing, and Stock management, each stage can become more profitable and easier to control. For example, when MS Mode used our modules they were able to: 🕸️ Successfully manage the complexity of multi-channel retail 📉 End the cycle of overstock and markdowns 💸 Eliminate lost revenue from understock and missed sales 💰 Achieve more revenue from the same (or less) inventory Today’s retail environment is tough. Demand can vary widely for each SKU, and also for every location and channel. Traditional forecasting isn’t anywhere near good enough for this. But, with our data-driven forecasting and automated allocation, retailers can gain highly granular control (without resorting to tedious manual management). Plus, they can tailor the system to each market and channel. Are you curious what Thunderstock could mean for your company? We will gladly tell you more! Send us a message here on LinkedIn (or get in touch through our website).

Retailers often treat seasonal peaks as a disruption, a stretch they try to cover and move through as fast as possible. I look at those same days and see something different. A window to outperform competitors. Early preparation shapes that window: Before the peak hits, you already open the sales lines and watch which styles pick up speed and which ones lose pace. That read sets up the final stretch. Every adjustment lands with full effect when the volume increases. This is the work we do with Thunderstock. We guide teams through the actuals that come in during those heavy days and help them steer the final stretch with confidence. It gives them access to the value that sits inside those holiday surges. Curious about what this could mean for your company? Let’s get in touch! 💬