The Busy Fool Problem of Overproduction
Overproduction it’s fashion's biggest commercial own goal.
If you paid for 10,000 units, shipped them across the world, stored them for six months, then ‘disposed’ of a third of them would you call that a good business?
No. You'd call it commercial insanity.
And yet, that is, give or take exactly what happens across the fashion industry every single season. The estimates vary conveniently, but somewhere between 20 and 40% of what gets made never finds a customer. It ends up in landfill sites in Chile, burning waste piles in Ghana, or quietly destroyed off the books to protect brand equity.
Busy fool energy. At industrial scale.
So why does it keep happening?
Because overproduction has always been the path of least resistance. Produce more and you protect yourself against stockouts. Produce more and the unit cost comes down, which looks great in a margin meeting, right up until you're discounting 35% of your range at 70% off in the end-of-season sale.
The system has been optimised for volume. Not for value. Not for accuracy.
But that's changing. Regulation is arriving fast, EU Ecodesign, Extended Producer Responsibility, due diligence legislation that will require brands to account for every stage of their supply chain. These are not hypotheticals- business as usual or rather ‘bad’ business as usual is no longer an option, your balance sheet and your reputation can’t manage it. The buying decisions being made right now are already carrying regulatory exposure. The question is whether your margin calculations are showing you that.
The fix isn't a values statement. It's a systems redesign.
Better forecasting. Smaller, more reactive buys. Pre-order strategies that de-risk intake before a single unit gets cut. And visibility of the full cost of overproduction sitting inside the buying process, not buried in a sustainability report that arrives three months after the decisions have already been made- LCA as great but teams need the information BEFORE purchases are made.
The brands still thriving in ten years will be the ones who did the ground work, the planning, the efficient production, the trading in short the hard work without the guessing.
Jo Ingham will be at Source on 7th July, 1.30–2.30pm, discussing exactly this. A practical conversation about overproduction, commercial reality, and what it looks like to stop burning a third of your range every season.
Find out more and book your place here.
Our Fashion Fix works with buying and commercial teams to make sustainability the language of commercial strategy. Find out more at ourfashionfix.com