Clothing is the only category in retail where perfectly good stock loses most of its value while sitting untouched on a rail. Nothing spoils, nothing expires, and yet a lawn suit that would have sold at full price in April is a clearance item by September. Most owners in Pakistan know this instinctively and still lose money to it every year, because the decision to discount is usually made when the season is visibly over rather than when the numbers first showed it was going. Markdown planning is simply the practice of acting earlier, on evidence, rather than late and in a panic.
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Why Seasonal Stock Behaves Differently
In most retail categories, unsold stock is simply money moving slowly. Buy a case of shampoo, sell it over four months instead of two, and you have lost some working capital but nothing else. Clothing does not work that way, because the item itself becomes less desirable with time regardless of its condition.
Pakistani clothing retail runs on a particularly sharp calendar. Eid drives two concentrated buying peaks, lawn season has a defined window, and winter stock has a short and weather-dependent run. Miss the peak and you are not selling late, you are selling into a market that has moved on. This is why the same design can go from full price to half price in eight weeks without anything about the garment changing.
Sell-Through Rate: The Number That Decides Everything
Sell-through is the percentage of a delivery that has sold after a given period. Receive sixty pieces of a design, sell twenty-four in the first three weeks, and your sell-through is forty percent. It is a simple calculation, and it is the single most useful figure in seasonal retail because it converts a vague sense of how something is doing into a number you can compare across designs.
What makes it powerful is that it works early. A design’s rate in the first three weeks predicts its full-season performance well enough to act on, which means you can make markdown decisions while there is still a season left to sell into. Waiting until stock visibly piles up means acting when the only remaining buyers are bargain hunters.
Key takeaway: the cost of a markdown is not the discount you give. It is the difference between the discount you would have needed in week four and the one you actually needed in week twelve.
When to Take the First Markdown
There is no universal week to start discounting, but there is a workable method. Decide in advance what sell-through you expect at a checkpoint, then review against it rather than against your impression of how the shop feels.
- Set a checkpoint at roughly a third of the way through the season
- Compare each design’s sell-through against your expectation for that point
- Act on designs well below it rather than waiting for them to recover
- Try position, display, or bundling before dropping the price
- Make the first markdown meaningful enough to change behaviour
The fourth point is worth trying first, because a design can underperform simply for sitting in a bad spot in the shop. Moving it to the front for a week costs nothing and occasionally solves the problem entirely. The fifth matters because timid discounts are the most expensive kind: a small reduction that fails to move stock burns weeks and ends in a deeper cut anyway.
Discounting by Variant, Not by Design
Blanket discounting is the most common markdown mistake in clothing retail. A design sells out of medium and large, holds a stack of small, and the owner puts the whole line on sale. The result is that the sizes still selling at full price are handed away cheaply while the problem sizes barely move anyway.
Discounting at variant level solves this, but it depends on the stock being tracked that way in the first place, which is the groundwork covered in our post on size and colour variant tracking. Once the data exists, the same principle applies to colour as to size, since one colourway in a collection frequently drags while the others perform normally.
Keeping discounts under control at the counter matters as much as setting them correctly. Where staff can apply a reduction manually, a planned markdown structure erodes into improvised bargaining within a fortnight. Price changes belong in the system, applied through central price control rather than negotiated per customer.
Carrying Stock Over to Next Year
Holding unsold seasonal stock until the season returns is tempting, and occasionally correct. Basics that do not date, plain colours, and staple winter items can genuinely be worth storing. Fashion pieces tied to a specific collection almost never are, because next year’s customer will compare them against next year’s designs.
The honest way to make the decision is to price the carry. Storage costs something, the capital is locked up for a year, and the realistic selling price twelve months later is usually below today’s clearance price rather than above it. Whatever you decide, keep carried stock clearly separated in your stock records, because mixing last season’s leftovers into this season’s figures quietly corrupts every sell-through calculation you make afterwards.
Planning the Next Season From This One
Every season generates the information needed to buy the next one better, and most of it is thrown away. At the end of a run, four figures are worth recording: sell-through by design, sell-through by size, which designs never needed a markdown, and total markdown value as a share of sales.
That last number is the discipline one. Markdowns feel like isolated decisions in the moment, and their combined weight only becomes visible when totalled. Owners who track it usually find the figure larger than expected, and it changes how they buy far more effectively than any resolution to be careful. Pulling these from season-level reports takes an hour and informs an entire buying cycle, which is a better return than almost anything else in a clothing business.
Conclusion
Markdowns are not a failure of buying, they are a normal cost of selling seasonal goods. What separates a profitable clothing shop from a struggling one is timing and precision: checking sell-through early, discounting the variants that need it rather than the whole design, keeping price control in the system, and recording what the season actually cost in markdown. Do that consistently and each season buys better than the last.
Do you know your sell-through rate this season?
We will set up sell-through and markdown reporting around your own designs, sizes and colours.
myPOS works with clothing retailers across Pakistan, and its garments POS setup tracks season performance at variant level as standard.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good sell-through rate for a clothing store?
It varies by category and season length, so your own past seasons are a better benchmark than a general figure. What matters is measuring it consistently at the same checkpoint.
How much should the first markdown be?
Large enough that customers notice and behaviour changes. A reduction too small to shift stock usually leads to a deeper cut later, costing more overall.
Should I discount a whole design or just some sizes?
Discount only the variants that are underperforming. Reducing sizes that are still selling at full price gives away margin for nothing.
Is it better to carry stock over or clear it?
Basics and staples can be worth carrying. Collection-specific fashion rarely is, since it competes against next year’s designs when it returns to the floor.
How do I track markdown losses properly?
Apply discounts through the system rather than manually at the counter, so total markdown value is recorded and can be compared against sales at season end.
