Clothing professionals are very familiar with the seasonality of their business and regularly see a strong impact of the weather on sales volumes. Delivery schedule and replenishment are at the heart of profitability for this sector.

The weather in autumn 2009 was especially interesting in this respect for the 09/10 winter collection:

A mild end of summer and autumn, coupled with the recession presented a real challenge for fashion sales departments.


While it is clear that information available at the time of creation and production of a collection is generally not conducive to forecasting the impact of the weather during the sales season, it is recommanded to devise an action plan based on a weather scenario:

• Modelling the sales behaviour of product families according to weather parameters
  (analyse the impact of the temperature, rain, sun,...).

METNEXT can also include economic, scheduling and store location parameters (city centre, shopping centre, etc …)

• Create indices and baseline values
• Calculate sales confidence intervalle over periods of time (scenario)

On shorter periods of time, Metnext designs prediction indices to optimise sales:

• Assistance with store enhancement
• Assistance with price policies
• Optimisation of communication (schedule, private sales/promotions, etc …)