Fashion has always been built around seasons, but the rhythm has changed. Where Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter once defined the year, many brands—especially fast-moving and digital-first players—now release new capsules or drops every few weeks. This shift raises the stakes: decisions once made a handful of times per year now repeat constantly, and with less room for error.
At the same time, the divide between pre-season planning and in-season execution is thinner than ever. What you commit to months in advance must anticipate competitor actions, while in-season adjustments need to reference assumptions set earlier. Success comes from linking these two halves of the cycle into a more connected approach.
The Two Halves of the Season
In pre-season, leaders commit to assortment structure, pricing ladders, and promotional budgets. Once product launches, the realities of consumer demand and competitor moves take over. This dynamic is familiar, but the pace of today’s market means those decisions collide faster and more forcefully. A competitor promotion that once ran a few times a season may now happen every week. Trends can emerge overnight and shift sell-through curves immediately.
The result is that planning and execution can no longer be treated as separate exercises. Instead, they need to operate as an integrated cycle, guided by a focused set of metrics that carry meaning from start to finish.
Metrics That Matter Most
Among the many measures available to fashion leaders, three consistently determine outcomes more than the rest: markdown exposure, sell-through, and average unit retail.
Sell-through against plan is another critical measure. When a product underperforms, early identification creates options: targeted promotions, reallocation of marketing weight, or adjustments in adjacent categories. Without this context, brands often default to broad markdowns that reduce margin across the board, even where it isn’t necessary.
Markdown exposure is one of the clearest signals of margin risk. When too much of the assortment is placed under promotion too early, profitability erodes and it becomes difficult to recover later in the season. Watching how markdown exposure evolves—both within your own assortment and across competitors—provides an early warning system.
Finally, average unit retail (AUR) reflects whether the pricing architecture set pre-season is holding in practice. A decline in AUR often signals either excessive reliance on promotions or a misalignment with competitor price points. Monitoring this trend allows leaders to see whether the pricing story they built at launch is sustaining throughout the season.
Other metrics such as inventory aging, SKU overlap, and margin retention certainly matter. But it is markdown exposure, sell-through, and AUR that most often determine whether a season holds its shape or slips into reactive discounting.
Decisions That Define Success
Every season, merchandising and commercial leaders make the same set of fundamental calls: how to pace promotions, when to hold price, where to intervene selectively, and how to allocate promotional budget across categories. What differentiates stronger performance today is not the awareness of these decisions, but the ability to act on them with sharper clarity.
There are tools today that make it possible to see competitor assortments, track promotions in real time, and benchmark pricing at the SKU level. With that visibility, promotion pacing becomes less of a guess; selective discounting can be executed with precision; price holding becomes a conscious choice rather than a risk; and promotional budgets can be aligned to market cadence instead of last season’s assumptions.
These capabilities don’t replace experience or intuition. They strengthen it—providing the context needed to confirm or challenge instincts. In a market that moves this quickly, that extra layer of intelligence is what allows brands to defend margin while still competing aggressively.
Conclusion
The acceleration of collections and the blurring of seasonal boundaries have raised the stakes for fashion leaders. Linking pre-season planning with in-season execution is no longer an aspiration—it’s a necessity. By focusing on the metrics with the greatest impact and using new forms of competitive intelligence to guide sharper decisions, brands can protect profitability and build resilience in a market where speed and precision matter more than ever.