How to optimise your margins

David Berliet, merchandising consultant, breaks down what every brand must know about collection architecture and pricing strategy.

One question before we get into today’s newsletter: what do you wish fashion media actually covered? We’re listening.

By Pedro Vasconcelos

Fashion media thinks of commercial as a dirty word. It’s often deployed as shorthand for boring. More often than not, the term appears as a prelude to discussions of financial strain or the increasingly familiar economics of survival. Yet, brands that endure are rarely built on creative breakthroughs alone. They are built on product. On repetition. On understanding what customers actually buy, returning to it season after season.

Merchandising consultant David Berliet knows it better than most. With experience in both buying and merchandising, Berliet has worked across menswear and accessories for brands like Louis Vuitton, Barneys and Bally. Over the past several years, he has advised emerging brands on collection architecture, pricing strategy, profitability, and assortment planning, helping transform creative projects into sustainable companies. While designers are trained to imagine what comes next, Berliet’s role is to ensure there is still a business there when it arrives.

Seated within a classroom at IFM, where he teaches as part of “executive education programmes” for professionals, Berliet makes a compelling case for a discipline often misunderstood. For him, merchandising is not about limiting creativity but creating the conditions for it to thrive.

How do you define a strong collection architecture?

For me, the basis is your permanent collection. It’s super stable. It’s all your permanent styles that are timeless, all your carryovers. You can sell them on a stable level throughout the seasons and throughout the years. These are your bestsellers and your navy or black essentials. What’s really important is that these styles are never marked down because they’re always on the sales floor and always on your website. You’re basically protecting your margins, that’s the beauty of your permanent collection.

Then you’re going to tweak that product with new seasonal styles that are updated. You’re going to update your permanent product in new seasonal colours, new seasonal fabrics, and new materials. You’re taking a proven style that you know is going to work, but you’re giving it freshness and excitement by offering it in a new colour or seasonal material. You’re basically giving it novelty, but the risk factor isn’t that high because you know the style works.