In-Season Chase

An in-season chase is any action taken after the buy is committed that changes what a brand will actually have to sell — a reorder against a style that is beating plan, a cancellation or push on one that is not, a colorway substitution against booked capacity, a transfer between doors, a re-allocation of warehouse holdback, or a price change. The word is often used narrowly to mean only the reorder; the useful definition covers every lever that moves the future inventory position in either direction, because all of them are governed by the same constraint.

That constraint is time, and the logic fits in two sentences. Every lever has a last responsible week: the week the season stops rewarding the change, minus the lead time that lever consumes. The season stops rewarding a change earlier than it ends — units landing in the final weeks clear at markdown regardless of how well the style is selling — so the question "is it too late to chase" has no general answer, only a per-lever one that has to be re-asked every week.

The levers, in the order they expire

Supply levers close first because they carry production lead times: the full reorder usually expires before the season opens, the chase against fabric already held survives longest. Cancellations expire at the vendor's material-commitment date, which sits upstream of the ship date on the order. Distribution levers — transfers between doors, re-allocation of undistributed stock — stay open for most of the season because they only move units that already exist. Markdown never closes, which is exactly why it is the lever of last resort.

Chase vs replenishment

The chase is sometimes confused with replenishment, and the difference is what was planned. Replenishment is the designed flow of a continuative program — stock arriving on a cadence the buy anticipated. A chase is unplanned by definition: a response to the season diverging from plan, funded from whatever open-to-buy remains, and constrained by capacity and material decisions that were mostly made before the season opened.

The full treatment — the lever table, the last-responsible-week arithmetic, a worked break-even showing how the same order flips from profitable to loss-making on date alone — is in the guide: The In-Season Chase.

RetailNorthstar holds the open-to-buy, current sell-through, and forward cover in one place, so the weekly question — which levers are still open, and what would pulling one cost — is read from the plan rather than rebuilt beside it. See how RetailNorthstar handles in-season OTB →