The engine nobody talks about: why the commercial side of fashion deserves more than a back seat

I've worked for six fashion brands over 15 years. Every single one did things differently: different planning tools, different buying processes, different ways of thinking about inventory, pricing, and range architecture. Some had sophisticated commercial functions. Some had brilliant creative directors and almost nothing else around them, and spent seasons wondering why the numbers didn't add up.

The pattern was consistent enough to be worth saying out loud: the brands that performed best commercially weren't necessarily the ones with the strongest creative vision. They were the ones where creative vision and commercial discipline worked together; not in opposition, not in parallel, but genuinely in conversation.

And yet the commercial side of fashion - merchandising, planning, inventory strategy - is still treated in many businesses as a back-office function. The engine that keeps everything running, but not the thing anyone wants to talk about at dinner.

I think that's a mistake. And I think it's costing brands more than they realise.

Why the commercial side gets underestimated

Fashion has always celebrated its creative half. Designers, creative directors, the cultural moments a great collection can produce - these are the things that get written about, photographed, discussed. That celebration is legitimate. Great creative direction is what makes fashion interesting, what gives a brand its identity, what makes a customer fall in love with something they didn't know they needed.

But somewhere along the way, the discipline that makes those moments commercially viable got positioned as the less interesting half of the equation. The necessary evil. The people who tell the creatives what they can't do.

That framing is not just unfair, it's inaccurate. And it leads directly to the underinvestment in commercial infrastructure that I've seen derail otherwise excellent brands.

When a company doesn't take merchandising seriously, a predictable set of problems follows. Seasons end with too much of the wrong stock and not enough of what sold. Bestsellers sell out and aren't replenished in time. Beautiful collections launch into channels with no coherent pricing architecture. Planning decisions get made reactively, late, and expensively. The creative team produces work they're proud of that the business can't execute properly and nobody quite understands why.

The yin and yang of fashion

The best description I've heard of how creative and commercial should work together is yin and yang: two distinct forces that only make sense in relation to each other. Neither is subordinate. Neither exists properly without the other.

A strong commercial function doesn't constrain creativity. It creates the conditions in which creativity can take risks. The hero piece that's never going to sell at volume? The merchandiser made space for it, because the rest of the range can carry it. The unexpected design direction that elevates the whole collection? It was costed, planned, and defended before a single sketch was drawn, because the commercial infrastructure was strong enough to absorb the risk.

The mistake many brands make is treating these as sequential rather than simultaneous: creative first, commercial second, as a kind of filter or correction mechanism. That's where the tension comes from. When commercial thinking enters the process late, it feels like constraint. When it's present from the beginning, it feels like enablement.

The collection is decided in the creative room. Whether it makes money is decided in mine. The two rooms need to be in constant conversation.

Merchandising is not just number crunching

This is the nuance that often gets lost when people talk about the commercial side of fashion. Merchandising at its best is not a purely analytical function. It requires a genuine understanding of the creative process, an instinct for where the market is going, and the ability to work alongside creative teams in a way that brings out the best in them rather than boxing them in.

The merchandisers I've most admired - and tried to be - are the ones who can read a room creatively just as well as they can read a WSSI. Who attend sketch reviews not to cross things out, but to ask the questions that shape the range before it becomes expensive to reshape it. Who understand why a particular fabric choice is non-negotiable, and find smarter ways to make it work commercially rather than simply saying no.

This is also why merchandising cannot be a purely office-based function. Data tells you what happened. The stores tell you why. I learnt this from a Sales Director at Pandora whose line I've never forgotten: the truth is always in the stores. A customer who doesn't find their size doesn't complain, they simply leave. In luxury retail this is particularly acute, as sizes aren't displayed on the rack. The store team guides the customer, which means when the right size isn't available, they leave disappointed - or they're redirected to the online store, but that means the sale is no longer attributed to the store team, which directly affects their monthly commission. Alternatively, the store team can raise a customer request directly with the merchandising team, ordering the missing size to arrive in a couple of days (though this doesn't work with tourists). These are what we call customer requests: a record sent from the store to the merchandising team, logging what was asked for and couldn't be fulfilled in the moment. They are one of the most honest signals in retail, and one of the most underused. A product that sparked genuine interest but couldn't close the sale doesn't show up in the sell-through report as a near-miss. It shows up as underperformance, and someone tries to explain it afterwards with data that was never designed to capture the moment of doubt.

Getting closer to that truth - understanding not just what sold, but why something didn't - is one of the most interesting unsolved problems in modern merchandising. The brands that build this capability, combining data rigour with genuine customer proximity, are the ones that get better at their decisions season after season rather than repeating the same expensive mistakes.

What it costs when this goes wrong

I want to be specific about this, because the consequences of underinvesting in commercial infrastructure are real and measurable, even if they're often invisible until they compound into a crisis.

Excess inventory is the most obvious. A brand that ends every season with significant stock left over isn't just losing margin on markdowns, it's tying up capital that could have been reinvested, filling warehouse space, and making next season's buy harder to execute cleanly. The 25% excess inventory reduction my team delivered at Toteme in a single year wasn't magic. It was what happens when you build proper planning infrastructure around a creative business that had been operating without one - and hire the right people with genuine understanding who can make sense of the problem and execute the right solution.

Lost sales are the less visible cost. Every time a customer wants a product in a size that isn't available, or a style that's been replenished too late, or a price point that doesn't exist in the range, that's revenue that doesn't show up anywhere in the reporting. It's the counterfactual that most brands never measure. The 98% on-shelf availability I delivered at Pandora across 200 stores didn't just improve sell-through. It changed how the brand thought about what it was leaving on the table.

And then there's the slower, harder-to-quantify cost: a creative team that loses confidence in the business around it. When collections don't perform not because the product was wrong but because the execution was poor (wrong depth, wrong allocation, wrong timing) the creative team draws the wrong conclusions. They second-guess instincts that were actually right. The commercial failure becomes a creative one, and the cycle gets harder to break.

Building the right balance

So what does it actually look like when this works properly? In my experience, a few things have to be true simultaneously.

Commercial thinking has to be present early. Not as a gate at the end of the creative process, but as a parallel workstream from the first day of a new season. The collection brief - SKU counts, price architecture, category mix, fabric targets - runs alongside the creative research, not after it. By the time sketches are being reviewed, the commercial shape of the season is already understood by everyone in the room.

The commercial team has to earn its place creatively. This means showing up with genuine product sensitivity, not just financial rigour. Understanding why this season's colour story matters. Knowing which styles are meant to be heroes and which are meant to be editorial statements. Being the person who advocates for the beautiful, impractical piece because they understand what it does for the rest of the range - not the person who cuts it because the margin doesn't work.

And the creative team has to trust that commercial discipline serves their vision rather than dilutes it. That trust is earned over time, through decisions that turned out to be right, through problems that were spotted early enough to fix, through the experience of a season that traded well because the foundations were properly built.

The fashion industry is getting better at this, slowly. The brands that figure it out earliest tend to be the ones that last. Not because they're the most creative, or the most commercially ruthless, but because they've learnt that the two things are not in competition. They're the same ambition, expressed in different languages. The job is translation.