Some Apparel Retailers Won The Holidays By Keeping Inventory Lean. Now Comes The Hard Part.

Halfway through 2020, Levi Strauss was already planning its inventories for the holidays, with little to no insight into what consumers were going to be spending their money on, or even how much money they would have, by the end of the year. “When the pandemic hit, we had to make a call on how we wanted to play inventory, because we were buying inventory for six months ahead of time … and not having real visibility to what the world was going to look like in six months,” Levi Chief Executive Chip Bergh said in a recent interview. “And we still have a little bit of that that we’re dealing with today.” “We decided, we would rather have too little inventory and miss a sale than have way too much inventory and have to be marking stuff down by 50% or 70%, which just isn’t good for brand health,” he said. Read more at CNBC.