Reorder Strategy
Your best seller sold out. This is how to decide when to reorder, how much to run, and how to reorder from the exact spec the factory built last time, without starting the tech pack over.
Selling out of a best seller should be the easy problem. You have proof the style works, so you just make more. In practice the reorder is where founders lose the most time, because the original spec is scattered. The tech pack is a PDF buried in an email thread, the BOM is a spreadsheet tab, the graded measurements are in a DM with your factory, and the approved colorway is a photo on your phone.
The deeper issue is drift. Drift is the gap between the spec you wrote and the garment the factory actually shipped. A yarn got discontinued and swapped mid-run. A seam allowance changed on the sewing floor and never made it back into the document. A trim vendor substituted a similar zipper. Six months later you cannot tell which version customers actually bought, so you reorder from a spec that no longer describes the product.
When the restock arrives a quarter-inch longer or a shade off, customers notice, and returns climb on the one style you were counting on. A reliable reorder starts from a single record that reflects what shipped, not a reconstruction of what you meant to ship.
Two numbers decide when to reorder inventory for clothing: sell-through rate and lead time. Sell-through rate is units sold divided by units received over a period. A hoodie that has sold 70 percent of its run in six weeks is behaving very differently from one at 20 percent, and only the first is a reorder candidate.
The trigger is not the moment you sell out. By then you are already losing sales you cannot recover. The real trigger is being on pace to sell out before a replacement can arrive, which means working backward from lead time. A cut-and-sew reorder is not just sewing time. It is fabric sourcing, a sample if anything changed, the production run, and freight. Domestic can be a few weeks; overseas can run a couple of months.
A simple rule: reorder when your weeks of supply on hand drop below your replenishment lead time plus a safety buffer. If a style has eight weeks of cover left and the reorder takes ten weeks to land, you are already late. Pairing sell-through with a real read on demand (the fashion demand forecasting guide goes deeper here) turns the timing from a guess into a schedule.
The reorder point is a borrowed idea from inventory management, and it travels well to apparel. In plain terms, the reorder point is the inventory level at which you place the next order so you do not stock out before it lands. The math is: reorder point equals average sales per week times lead time in weeks, plus safety stock.
Apparel adds three wrinkles. First, the size curve: you stock out of M and L long before S and XL, so a style is effectively out when the core sizes are gone, even with units left on the rack. Second, seasonality: a summer tee has a hard end date, so a late reorder can strand inventory. Third, MOQs: you cannot cheaply reorder a single size, so the apparel reorder point is really per-size demand measured against a full-run minimum.
A worked example: a tee sells 40 units a week across sizes, the reorder lands in eight weeks, and you want three weeks of safety stock. Reorder point is (40 x 8) plus (40 x 3), or 440 units. When on-hand crosses 440, it is time to place the order. Core product replenishment for fashion is mostly this calculation, run per style and weighted by the sizes that actually move.
A proven style earns a bigger run than a new one, because the risk is lower. Knowing how to restock best sellers is mostly a question of sizing the run to the confidence you have earned. A useful playbook for a small brand runs in confidence tiers: about 100 units to test a new style, about 200 once you are confident, and about 300 to 500 on a proven reorder. The reorder sits at the top of that range precisely because you are no longer guessing; you have real sell-through data behind it.
Size the quantity against three limits. MOQs set the floor: domestic factories often start at 50 to 100 units per style and color, premium small-batch makers in places like Portugal or Turkey at 100 to 300, and larger overseas factories at 200 to 500 or more. Cash sets the ceiling: a bulk run is roughly 20,000 to 80,000 dollars, and reorders compete with new development for the same money. Velocity and remaining season set the target between them.
Weight the reorder toward the sizes and colors that sold, not an even split, and remember that materials are the largest and most cost-sensitive line, roughly 60 to 70 percent of unit cost with trims. A repeat order is often where you can hold or improve fabric pricing, so a proven reorder can carry slightly better margins than the first run. For a fuller model of sizing a run from scratch, the guide on how much to produce covers the full method.
The fastest reorder is the one where you do not rebuild the spec at all. That requires a canonical record: one structured production record per style that holds the spec, the BOM, the graded measurements, the construction notes, the colorways, and the revision history in one place. When you reorder, you pull the record that already reflects what shipped, instead of reassembling it from email threads.
This is the part Silhouet handles today. The AI generates a factory-ready tech pack (spec, BOM, measurements, and construction) that you review and accept, so nothing is written without your confirmation. Because you accepted a version, the reorder starts from that accepted spec, not a fresh draft. If something did change since the last run, a fabric swap or a revised measurement, the AI factory-readiness check reads the tech pack the way a factory would and flags what they would ask about before you send it.
How to reorder from a clothing manufacturer then becomes a clean handoff: you send the canonical tech pack, and the factory can quote and produce it with fewer rounds of questions, because the document already answers them. The AI Tech Pack Generator is where that record gets built the first time, and every reorder just draws from it.
Not every style deserves a reorder strategy, and treating them all the same wastes cash. Most brands run two kinds of product. There is a core: the proven, repeatable styles that define the brand and restock predictably. And there is an experimental tail: the drops, collabs, and tests you run to learn what sticks. Reorder strategy lives almost entirely in the core.
The tail is where the roughly 100-unit test belongs, small runs you can afford to be wrong about. The core is where you commit the 300 to 500. The work is keeping the line between them honest. Use sell-through and repeat-purchase behavior to promote a tail style into the core once it proves itself, and to retire a core style that is fading before you reorder dead stock out of habit.
The discipline is simple to state and easy to skip: reorder the styles that pay you back, and stop funding the ones that do not, even when they sit in a category you think of as core. Filtering the line this way keeps cash concentrated in the product that actually earns a restock.
Deciding which core sellers to restock is easier when the sell side and the make side share data. Silhouet syncs your Shopify catalog in minutes, so sales performance links to each product you are building. On top of that, the reorder insight points to which core sellers to restock and which dead stock to skip.
That means the reorder decision is grounded in what actually sold, per style and colorway, not a gut read at the end of the season. Restock the winners, skip the styles sitting in the corner of the warehouse, and put the production budget where the repeat demand is. This connection between what a brand sells and how it gets made is the whole idea behind Shopify to Production.
The insight is not a forecasting engine you have to configure. It reads your own catalog and history and surfaces the core sellers worth another run, so the next reorder question starts with evidence instead of a hunch.
A reorder is not really a new project. It is the next turn of a style you already know. Production memory is what makes it feel that way. In Silhouet, each product you build makes the next one easier, because the spec, the materials, and the sizing carry forward instead of resetting every season.
For reorders, that carry-forward is continuity. The fifth run of a hoodie matches the first because the record and the memory both persist, from the original design intent through the accepted spec to the sell-through that justified another run. Design, structured production data, and inventory performance live in one system, so continuity is the default instead of something you police by hand.
You can manage every collection this way across its full lifecycle, and it is free to start. The point is not to add another tool between you and your factory. It is to make sure the tenth reorder is as accurate as the first sample, without you rebuilding the spec each time.
The reorder point is the on-hand inventory level that should trigger your next order, set so the restock arrives before you sell out. In plain terms it is average weekly sales times your lead time in weeks, plus a safety buffer. For apparel, calculate it per style and weight it toward the sizes that actually move, since you stock out of the middle sizes first.
There is no single universal number, because it depends on how much season is left and how long your reorder takes to land. As a working guide, a style selling through faster than you can replace it is a reorder candidate, while one moving slowly is not, no matter how much you like it. Pair the sell-through rate with your lead time: the real question is whether you will run out before more product can arrive.
Work backward from when the new units need to be on the shelf. Add up fabric sourcing, any sampling if the spec changed, the production run, and freight, then place the order while you still have that many weeks of cover left, plus a buffer. A reorder that takes ten weeks to arrive has to be placed before your weeks of supply drop below ten, or you will have a gap on your best seller.
A common playbook for a small brand is roughly 100 units to test a new style, about 200 once confident, and 300 to 500 on a proven reorder, sized against your factory's MOQ and your cash. A bulk run is roughly 20,000 to 80,000 dollars, so reorders compete with new styles for the same budget. Weight the quantity toward the sizes and colors that sold, not an even split.
Keep one canonical record per style that holds the spec, BOM, measurements, construction, and colorways, and reorder from the version the factory actually built. Silhouet generates that factory-ready tech pack for your review and keeps it in one place, and a factory-readiness check flags anything that drifted before you send it. Then reordering from your manufacturer is a clean handoff instead of a reconstruction.
Pull the canonical record for every style, get reorder insight on your core sellers, and sync your Shopify catalog in minutes. Request beta access to try it free.