Omnichannel Assortment Planning
Most apparel brands plan DTC, wholesale, and marketplace channels separately — creating inventory conflicts, missed allocation opportunities, and duplicate planning work.
The silo problem
Omnichannel assortment planning is the practice of planning product assortments across all sales channels — DTC e-commerce, wholesale accounts, owned retail stores, marketplaces, and pop-ups — from a single unified view, rather than building separate plans for each channel.
Most apparel brands don't do this. Instead, they plan each channel independently:
- The DTC team builds an assortment for the website
- The wholesale team builds assortments for each account
- The marketplace team (if one exists) picks from whatever is left
- Nobody coordinates inventory allocation across channels until it's too late
The result: duplicated planning effort, conflicting inventory commitments, and a total buy that's larger than it needs to be — because each channel padded its own plan with a safety buffer, and nobody ever reviewed the stacked total. One buffer is prudence; three or four buffers on the same demand is an over-buy nobody decided to make.
Why channel silos form
Channel silos aren't usually intentional. They form because:
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