Adding a colourway feels like the cheapest growth lever in clothing. The pattern exists, the factory is set up, the photography is a marginal cost. Merchandising will always argue for one more. For two volumes we let them, and it was a mistake worth writing down.
What actually happens
A fifth colour does not create a fifth customer. It splits the four you had. Total units on the style barely moved when we went from three colours to five; what moved was the depth per colour, from roughly 400 units to 240. Below about 300 units the mill’s price breaks change and the per-unit cost goes up by eleven per cent.
Then the tail arrives. In a range of three, all three sell through at a similar rate. In a range of five, two of them do not, and by week ten you are holding stock in a colour nobody chose, which either sits in a warehouse or goes to a sale that trains customers to wait.
The cost nobody books
The one that surprised us was returns. Two extra colours pushed the return rate on that style from 9 to 14 per cent, almost entirely on colour rather than fit. Colour is the hardest thing to judge on a screen, and the more marginal the shade, the more often the guess is wrong. Every one of those returns is a free collection, a re-inspection, and a bag that cannot be resold at full price if the tag came off.
What we do now
- Three colourways per style, four at most, and only when the fourth is a genuinely different proposition rather than an adjacent shade.
- A new colour has to work with at least six existing pieces in the range before it goes into sampling.
- If two colours in a proposal are within a few points of each other, one of them is cut. If we cannot tell them apart on a screen, neither can you.
The part that is not about money
There is a version of this argument that is purely commercial, and it is the less interesting one. The better reason to hold at three is that a tight palette is what makes a wardrobe work in combination. Every colour we add is one more thing that has to agree with everything else, and the agreements get harder to keep as the set grows.
Making fewer things is not restraint for its own sake. It is the only way the promise on the front page stands up.