The Weekly Trade Meeting

What the weekly trade meeting is

The weekly trade meeting is the recurring in-season forum where a brand reviews last week's sales, stock, and intake against plan and decides what changes this week. It goes by different names — the trade meeting, the trading meeting, Monday trade, the weekly business review — and the name matters less than the output. The output is a list of decisions with owners and dates. Everything else in the meeting exists to produce that list.

This guide covers the meeting itself: the agenda, the document behind it, the authority it needs, and the loop that connects one week's meeting to the next. Two neighbouring pieces cover the machinery either side of it. How often to reforecast derives the cadence and mechanics of the reforecast that should arrive at the meeting already finished. The in-season chase enumerates the levers the meeting's decisions actually pull, and the week each one stops working — which is the fact that gives the meeting its urgency.

The agenda that works

The agenda below is a structure most trading organisations converge on because each block feeds the next. The order is the point: it runs from what was promised, through what happened, to what is coming, and ends where the meeting's value lives.

Three notes on running it, each of which is a common failure in the field.

Review last week's actions first, every week, without exception. This is the single highest-leverage agenda choice available. The moment actions stop being reviewed, they stop being real — agreeing to an action in a meeting that never checks completion is free, and everyone in the room prices it accordingly. Reviewing them first also means the review cannot be squeezed out by an overrunning sales discussion, which is otherwise what happens every week that trading is interesting.

Decompose the misses before discussing them. "Sales are behind plan" is not discussable; it is a fact with at least four different causes — demand, availability, price, and phasing — that lead to four different actions. Cutting receipts is right if demand is genuinely smaller, and wrong if the units simply landed late. The decomposition discipline is its own subject, covered in decomposing a plan miss; the trade meeting is where its output gets used. A miss that arrives at the meeting undecomposed gets decomposed in the room, expensively, or — worse — acted on undecomposed.

Read stock as forward cover, not as units. A unit count says nothing without a rate of sale against it. The number the meeting needs is weeks of supply against the remaining full-price window, by category and by channel — because the same stock figure is a shortage in one door and a markdown risk in another, and the aggregate hides both.

The WSSI is the meeting's backbone

The document behind the meeting is the WSSI — the weekly worksheet that reconciles sales, stock, and intake in a single rolling arithmetic: opening stock, minus sales and markdowns, plus intake, equals closing stock, week by week to season end. It is the backbone for a structural reason, not a traditional one. Every question on the trade agenda is a row or a consequence in the WSSI. Sales against plan is the top block. Forward cover is closing stock read against forward sales. Intake risk is the intake line against what is actually confirmed. And the open-to-buy position — how much buying money the season has left, and whether last week earned more of it or consumed it — falls out of the same arithmetic rather than living in a separate document.

Two disciplines make the WSSI work as a meeting backbone rather than a meeting subject.

The reforecast happens before the meeting, not during it. The planner overwrites the forward sales weeks with the current expectation and lets the stock and intake consequences cascade, so the meeting opens on a picture that already reflects last week. A meeting that builds the reforecast live has converted its decision hour into an analysis hour, and the decisions move to hallway conversations afterward, where they are made without the numbers.

One version, visible to everyone in the room. The classic failure is the buyer's view and the planner's view disagreeing in the meeting, and the first twenty minutes going to reconciliation. Whatever tooling the team runs, the trade meeting needs a single WSSI that both sides accept as the season's state — because every decision the meeting makes is only as good as the number it was made against.

Decision rights: who can move what

A trade meeting can only decide what its attendees are allowed to decide, and this is settled before the season or not at all. The specific rights that matter, because they are the ones the agenda will call on weekly:

• →Who can release or hold open-to-buy, and up to what value without escalation. If every chase order needs a signature from outside the room, the meeting's fastest lever runs a week of latency it cannot afford — the OTB position has to be actionable by someone at the table.
• →Who can mark down, within what band of depth and scope. A pre-agreed band — the meeting may trigger a first markdown on styles meeting agreed criteria, deeper or storewide actions escalate — lets the routine price decisions happen at trading speed while the brand-shaping ones still get senior eyes.
• →Who can move, re-phase, or cancel intake, within what bounds and against which vendor terms.
• →Who can move stock between channels, doors, and the warehouse holdback.

The principle underneath all four: set the thresholds once, pre-season, so the meeting never has to discover its own authority mid-decision. The alternative is the meeting that agrees something must be done, then adjourns to find out whether it may — and the finding-out consumes exactly the week that was the margin of the decision. Escalation is not a failure; unbounded escalation is. A meeting with clear thresholds escalates the few decisions that deserve it and executes the rest.

Why a meeting that only reports is a failure

The case against the reporting meeting is not that reporting is worthless. It is that the report is time-stamped and the levers are perishable.

Every in-season lever — the reorder, the chase against held fabric, the cancellation, the re-phase, the transfer — has a last week in which pulling it still changes the season's outcome, set by that lever's lead time against the remaining full-price window. The in-season chase computes those deadlines lever by lever; the summary that matters here is that some of those windows are one or two meetings wide. A trade meeting that observes a problem, agrees it is concerning, and closes without an owned action has not been neutral. It has spent one week of every open lever's remaining life, and the same numbers will return next week with fewer options attached.

The diagnostic is blunt and worth running quarterly: pull the action lists from the last several trade meetings and count the decisions that were made in the room, in the week the signal appeared. If the honest count is near zero — if every real decision was actually made elsewhere, later — the meeting is a report with attendance, and the fix is not a better deck. It is the decision-rights work above, and an agenda that ends on actions rather than on any-other-business.

The trade-meeting-to-action loop

The meeting is one arc of a loop, and the loop is what compounds. In sequence: actuals land and the planner reforecasts the WSSI; the meeting consumes the reforecast and produces decisions; the decisions execute during the week; and next week's meeting opens by checking that they did. Four properties keep the loop closed rather than decorative.

Every action has one owner and one date. An action owned by a team is owned by nobody, and an action without a date is a hope. The list is short by design — a meeting that produces fifteen actions weekly is producing actions that will not be reviewed, and unreviewed actions decay into wishes.

Actions are written into the plan, not only into minutes. A decision to cut intake exists when the intake line in the WSSI changes and the open-to-buy recomputes — not when a bullet appears in a meeting note. If the plan is not updated, next week's reforecast silently reverts the decision, and the meeting re-makes it, sometimes for several consecutive weeks without anyone noticing.

The loop feeds the reforecast cadence rather than replacing it. The trade meeting runs weekly because sales data arrives weekly and levers expire weekly; the deeper re-plans it triggers follow their own logic, covered in how often to reforecast.

The loop keeps its memory. The record of what was decided, why, and what happened next is the raw material of the post-season hindsight, and it is also what makes recurring decisions faster — a team that can see it marked this style down three weeks after first discussing it has learned something a team with clean minutes and no memory re-learns every season.

Where the spreadsheet version breaks

Everything above can be run on spreadsheets, and for one department, one channel, one planner, it genuinely works — the WSSI was born as a worksheet. The structure breaks with scale, and it breaks in the same places at most brands.

Preparation eats the week. The spreadsheet WSSI is fed by hand: actuals exported, pasted, reconciled, the reforecast re-keyed. As departments and channels multiply, the planner's week inverts — most of it goes to building the picture and the remainder to thinking about it, and the meeting reviews numbers that were true as of the export, days ago. The meeting drifts from trading the season to auditing the sheet.

One sheet per department means no single position. The trade meeting needs the total view — cover by channel, open-to-buy in aggregate, the misses ranked across the business — and the spreadsheet version assembles that view by consolidation, which is slow, manual, and version-fragile. When the buyer's copy and the planner's copy disagree in the room, the reconciliation consumes the decision time, which is the exact failure the backbone was supposed to prevent.

Actions have nowhere to live. A spreadsheet plan and a minutes document are two systems with no connection, so the decision-to-plan write-back that keeps the loop closed depends entirely on discipline, and discipline is the first casualty of a busy trading week. The decisions that were made stop being visible in the numbers, and the loop silently opens.

None of this argues that a brand with three categories and one channel needs a platform. It argues that the trade meeting's failure modes at scale — stale inputs, contested versions, decisions that evaporate — are structural, and that a team hitting them weekly should recognise them as the tooling's ceiling rather than as its own indiscipline.

Related resources

• →WSSI (Weekly Sales, Stock and Intake) — the document the meeting runs on
• →The In-Season Chase — the levers the meeting's decisions pull, and the week each one expires
• →How Often to Reforecast a Merchandise Plan — the cadence of the re-plan that feeds the meeting
• →Decomposing a Plan Miss — the discipline that makes the sales-vs-plan block discussable
• →Weeks of Supply (WOS) — the cover metric the stock block should be read in
• →OTB Planning — the open-to-buy machinery behind the meeting's fastest lever