The problem of losing your brand's SOUL.

There is something that is happening more and more.

A brand arrives with a sales problem. It wants more product. More options. More references. And almost always, that is not the problem.

The problem is that they don't know what they have. They are no longer connecting with their SOUL.

The illusion of growth through volume

For decades, the industry operated on a simple logic: more SKUs equal more opportunities. More references on the shelf, more chances for something to connect.

The data says otherwise.

According to McKinsey & Company, fashion brands that have reduced their assortment by 15% to 30% have seen gross margin improvements of between 2 and 4 percentage points, with no significant loss in net sales. The problem was not the quantity. It was the structure.

The State of Fashion 2024 report by McKinsey and Business of Fashion points out that the operational complexity generated by excess SKUs is one of the main inhibitors of profitability in medium-sized brands. Larger teams, more samples, more negotiation with suppliers, more dead stock at the end of the season.

Zara has been proving the opposite for years: high rotation with a controlled assortment. It's not just speed, it's collection discipline.

What an assortment audit reveals

When we analyze a collection category by category, SKU by SKU, channel by channel, almost always the same thing appears:

The Pareto principle applied to product is met with surprising regularity: between 15% and 25% of the references generate between 70% and 80% of sales and margin. The rest exists out of inertia, habit, or because "something similar was sold last year."

Harvard Business Review documented this phenomenon in fashion retail in its analysis The Hidden Cost of SKU Complexity (2022): the real cost of maintaining an unsellable reference is not just the stock, it is the opportunity cost of physical space, the tied-up capital, and the management time it consumes for teams.

Specifically in footwear, a study by the analytical platform Edited on mid-priced European brands (2023) showed that 34% of items introduced in-season had a sell-through of less than 30%, which means that more than a third of the product does not meet any real commercial objective.

Architecture before product

A well-built collection is not a list of items. It is a system with explicit roles.

The model we use at QOLABS starts with a simple but operational classification:

• Traffic drivers: references that attract, not necessarily the most profitable

• Margin builders: the core of the business, high contribution, stable demand

• Image pieces: positioning, visibility, not always in volume

• Complements: accessories, pairs, family extensions

When that architecture is not documented, when it lives only in one person's head, the collection grows by default, not by design. Each season is added without removing. What "worked" is replicated without understanding why it worked or if it is still relevant.

The consultancy Kurt Salmon (now Accenture) estimated as early as 2019 that 40% of the new SKUs introduced annually in medium-sized European fashion brands duplicated functionality with already existing references. Four years later, the problem has not improved; it has worsened with the pressure for immediacy and fast fashion.

The question that changes the work

There is a question I ask at the beginning of any project:

Do you know exactly why each reference in your collection exists?

Not "what it does" in the abstract. But why it is there, what role it occupies within the architecture, what would happen if it weren't there.

Most teams cannot answer with precision. And it is probably because no one has done the work of explicitly articulating that logic and reviewing it with real data.

That is the work.

Before the new product. Before the new season. Before the new campaign.

Understand what you already have. Return to your essence.

QOLABS Editorial