Prevention Begins With Production

Sara Kim highlights the production and sourcing decisions that manifest into product returns and what retailers can do to avoid them.

Tell me if you have heard these before:

• "We need to cut costs by 5% on this entire assortment."
• "Can we find a new vendor that can turn this around in half the time?"
• "The fabric looks different than the sample, but we have to ship it anyway to hit the floor date."

These are typical stories for retailers, but not without a heavy lift. Sourcing departments, designers, and merchants work tirelessly with their vendors to make it happen. Yet despite everyone's best intentions, the trade-offs from these actions can lead to mistakes which lead to returns.

After years of working in product development and production, both for retailers and vendors, I understand retailers' struggles and what vendors do to meet retailers' needs. I've seen, managed, and mitigated many issues and know what can arise.

I mention these points not to suggest they are bad practices or to insinuate that they will invariably result in adverse outcomes. I tell them to emphasize where and why breakdowns happen, which can increase product returns. When production quality falters, even slightly, it becomes a major driver of the "Size and Fit" or "Item Defective" return reasons we see so often in customer feedback.

Bridging the Gap

The key to prevention is ensuring that the production and sourcing teams have direct visibility into the returns data. If they don't know that a specific cost-cutting measure resulted in a 30% return rate for that garment, they will continue making the same decisions.