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Products · Simbus Velo for Fashion and Lifestyle Retail

Sell More at Full Price.
Hold Less of the Stock.

Agile Replenishment Simplified

Merchandise planning, store replenishment and AI style replacement for fashion retail - one continuous loop, built on the Databricks Lakehouse. We enable organisations to refill winners, swap dead options for live lookalikes, pull back slow movers. Implemented with a leading Indian menswear retailer - ERP-integrated replenishment into Microsoft Dynamics AX

+22%Full-price sell-through
+15–20%Store in-stock rate
>95%Routine replen orders automated
Problems, We Solve
30–40%

of inventory is sold in end-of-season sale — after only ~45 days of full-price shelf life

6–9 mo

design-to-shelf lead time, committed against a selling season of ~12 weeks

20–40%

size-set breakage on the floor — core sizes gone, fringe sizes left for markdown

94%

of brands still buy to long-range forecasts — for styles with no sales history

80–95%

of in-season fixes — transfers, restocks — are manual, planner by planner

90–150 days

of stock carried by Indian apparel retailers — industry days-on-hand hit an all-time high in 2024, +14% vs pre-2020

The season is decided before it starts. Then the customer decides otherwise.

Your OTB is largely spent and the option plan locked 90–120 days before the range hits the floor. Once selling starts, the plan is rarely re-cut. When live sell-through diverges from it, and it always does, the losses are structural, not occasional.

T – 120 days

Buy committed

Range, options, depth and ratio packs signed off on a forecast for styles that haven't sold a unit.

Week 1

Range pushed out

Initial allocation goes by store grade and gut feel, so the DC empties into doors that may never sell it.

Weeks 2–4

Winners break

Bestsellers lose core sizes in A-grade doors while replen waits for next week's WSSI review.

Weeks 5–10

Slow lines clog

Dead options hold fixture slots and cover climbs, while fresh newness has nowhere to go.

End of season

Markdown clears it

EOSS discounts what never sold. The winners sold out at full price weeks ago.

Your POS already generates the sell-through signal every day. What's missing is a way to act on it at store × option speed, before the range sells down and the season window closes.

Want to estimate your revenue leakage?Talk to Simbus Velo Experts →
Questions, We Answer

Why your ERP, WSSI and forecast-led push planning fall short in-season

Fashion demand at store × option × size is too noisy to forecast well, and the further from the customer you place stock, the harder it is to move. Theory of Constraints flips the question: stop pushing on a forecast, and pull on what actually sold.

Why push planning falls short

  • Forecasts each style before it has sold a unit, then pushes most of the buy to stores on day one
  • Allocates by store grade, so A-doors stock out while C-doors sit on weeks of cover
  • Reads a broken size or empty fixture as "no demand", so a winner's rate of sale looks weaker than it is
  • Re-plans weekly at chain level, always a week behind what each door actually sold
  • Blankets every store with safety stock, tying up OTB and floor space in the wrong places
  • ERP records what happened; it was never built to decide tonight's store-option moves

The Velo advantage: TOC replenishment

  • Replenishes to actual consumption: what sold today is what gets refilled tonight
  • Holds reserve depth at the DC, where variability pools, and releases it only where demand proves out
  • Reads true rate of sale by excluding the days a size was genuinely out of stock, so a bestseller never looks like a slow mover
  • Subordinates every call to your option plan, fashion-bucket min/max and fixture capacity
  • Replenish, Replace or Remove: refills winners, swaps dead options for live lookalikes, pulls back slow movers
  • Gives planners a ranked, explained exception list in place of a spreadsheet

Have more questions?

Explore FAQ section
Modules, We Offer

One planning layer, from pre-season assortment to in-season replenishment

Simbus Velo sits on top of your ERP and WMS. It doesn't replace them. Every night it turns the day's sell-through into store × option calls your buying, merchandising and allocation teams can trust.

Pre-season planning

  • Store–SKU affinity model, stock-out corrected
  • Constrained fill: bucket min/max, planogram
  • AI-decided store vs reserve split
  • Size-depth norms by bucket × grade
  • Non-pivotal ratio caps & override guardrails
  • Mid-season plan versioning & re-validation

In-season execution

  • 3-level triggers: options, pivotal sizes, slots
  • Replenish → Replace → Remove decision tree
  • Warehouse-first, then inter-store transfers
  • Non-pivotal sizes in replenish & replace
  • Pull-back orders on slow movers (60-day rule)
  • ERP order-ID handshake & auto-cancel

AI under the hood

  • Visual Replace: image embeddings + vector search
  • Match blends look, category, colour, fit, price
  • Every Replace explained in plain English (agents)
  • Databricks Genie — ask-in-English insights for management
  • End-to-end on the Databricks Lakehouse
Verticals, We Specialise

Built for fashion and lifestyle retailers who run their own stores

Whether you run 30, 100 or several hundred exclusive brand outlets, wherever a range is bought ahead, phased by season and refreshed with drops, the same two problems bite: markdowns on what didn't sell, and lost sales on what did.

Apparel & fashion

Seasonal ranges and frequent drops; core styles stock out mid-week while fashion lines pile up.

Footwear

Deep size runs, and blanket safety stock tying up cash across every door.

Sportswear & athleisure

Never-out-of-stock core running alongside seasonal colourway launches.

Accessories & bags

Wide option counts, shallow depth and constant newness churn.

Approach, We Take

Replenish to consumption, not to forecast

The Velo approach — Theory of Constraints

  • Pull, not push

    Depth stays at the warehouse — the point of highest aggregation. Stores are seeded light and replenished daily from actual sales.

  • Dynamic buffer management

    Penetration decides what gets ordered. When warehouse stock is short, store grade and predicted sell-through decide who gets it first. Thresholds are configurable by store grade × fashion bucket — never hardcoded.

  • A fashion bucket = a look

    Velo plans and protects option count and size integrity per look — not just total units.

  • Configuration, not code

    Buffer zones, grade triggers, depth norms, planogram and style holds are all configurable — every change captured with a reason and an audit trail.

Pull-back is a separate discipline. Stock that has sat 60 days with almost no sales is proposed for return or hold, so capital is not stranded on the floor.

Buffer per store × fashion bucket

options on the floor vs the option norm for that look

  • Green · 67%+healthy — monitor
  • Yellow · 33–67%replenish per grade rule
  • Red · 5–33%top of the order queue
  • Black · 0–5%the look is off the floor

A stores: any sale · B: at Yellow · C: at Red. Zones, boundaries and grade rules are configuration, not product constants — shown here is our reference client's setup.

Executive scorecard —Throughput: full-price sell-through upInventory: working capital downOpEx: planner effort & markdowns down

How It Works

One continuous loop: Assort › Replenish › Replace

Pre-season

Buy plan & OTB intake

season budget, options, bucket mix

Constrained assortment

bucket min/max · planogram · size depth

Initial fill

AI split: store vs warehouse reserve

In-season · Daily loop

Buffer check

daily, per store–SKU–size

Replenish

warehouse first, then inter-store

Replace

AI visual match for sold-outs

Remove / hold

pull-back orders · 60-day rule

ERP write-back

order-ID handshake · exceptions

Repeats nightly. Orders are in your ERP before stores open — decisions land in role-based dashboards, with Databricks Genie for ask-in-English insights.

Results, We Achieve

More of the season sold at full price, less of it cleared in the sale.

Velo moves the merchandising KPIs your leadership already reviews every week, from full-price sell-through and markdown spend to in-stock and stock carrying cost.

+22%Full-price sell-through
−34%Markdown spend
+15–20%Store in-stock rate
−15–20%Inventory carrying cost
>90%Red-zone alerts resolved in 48 hours
>95%Routine replen orders automated

Stop clearing your bestsellers' margin in the sale.

Start with a free sell-through and availability health check on a sample of your stores. We'll show you where full-price sales are walking out and where OTB is stuck, using your own data.

Talk to a Simbus Fashion Planning Expert