Most fashion brands entered 2025 over-inventoried and under pressure. New tariffs combined with an industry-wide inventory glut to make both profits and revenue growth scarce. Discounting rose, margins compressed, and a wave of bankruptcies followed.

When Tradlands - a women’s classic essentials brand - started working with Patchwork in March 2025, the business (like many) was in decline.

Revenue was down 34% year-over-year. Discounting had climbed to 44%. Margins were at a historic low.

One year later, the brand is thriving. Gross Revenue is up 63%, the discount rate is down to 25% and profits are up 146%

How did Tradlands achieve this - especially in an industry where most brands are experiencing flat or declining profit?

This article will cover the results as well as some of the mechanics that drove them. To summarize the “how”:

These changes unlocked three benefits that are difficult to achieve in a traditional supply chain:

We dedicate a section to each of these three key achievements.

Like most brands using traditional supply chains, Tradlands had grown accustomed to a familiar problem: best sellers stocked out, while slower styles lingered.

In other words, you’re out-of-stock on the things that actually generate revenue and over-stocked on the things that don’t.

Below is an example of a couple styles where this happened. They sold well for 2 months while stocked, until only the less popular sizes remained. From there, sales slowed to a trickle until inventory was finally cleared entirely.

In contrast to this, since launching with Patchwork, Tradlands has been able to stay well-stocked of its best sellers, experiencing comparatively minor interruptions as the brand succeeded in giving customers what they wanted.

How? The Patchwork system is designed around continuous replenishment. Instead of betting upfront, inventory is added only once demand is proven. 1-2 weeks after the initial launch of a new style, a replenishment purchase order is sent using real-time demand signals. From there the agile supply chain does its work, ensuring best sellers stay available and in stock.

Below are two of the best sellers of the past year. All green, aside from a minor interruption shortly after the launch of each.

This shift alone explains a large part of the turnaround:
Tradlands capitalized on demand instead of stockpiling guesses.

The Revenue, up 63% vs last year, more than recovered the prior year’s -34% declines vs Q1’2024.

Inventory is where most apparel brands lose. Brands commit an average of 52% of available capital into inventory; a dangerous commitment for most, since it handicaps the brand financially while risking loss of relevance the longer the inventory sits.

Reducing commitments from 6 months to 2 months has a number of benefits, among them:

The 4th point was a revelation for Tradlands in the first few months following the Patchwork launch. After a few years of declines, the brand was no longer generating enough cash flow to stretch over the industry’s high minimum order quantities (“MOQs”). What once was an assortment stretching across multiple categories and consumer choices became constrained to just a few core styles within the dresses category.

But the brand regained assortment breadth after onboarding with Patchwork. Whereas garment manufacturers often impose minimum order quantities (“MOQs”) of ~1,000 per style per order, they found that Patchwork vendors worked with orders as low as 25-50 units per style per order.

So the assortment grew as the brand regained the flexibility to test. That flexibility served two related purposes. First - unshackle design creativity. In the words of Tradlands founder, Sadie Beaudet, “I’m having fun for the first time in YEARS.” Second - allow the assortment to complement itself. Expansions into tops, sweaters, and bottoms meant customers had new reasons to engage (and buy)!

One of the new styles - the “Porch Balloon Pants” - became a big seller for a brand that had been unable to spare budget for bottoms in almost 2 years.

Despite the number of new experiments and launches, Tradlands was also able to keep inventory committed to ‘duds’ low enough to avoid reactive markdowns.

Case in point: in Q1 of 2025, the brand had a 44% discount rate - somewhat higher than the industry standard 40%. By contrast, Q1 of 2026 boasted a 25% discount rate - far better than the industry average, and approaching Zara’s industry leading ~17%.

As many readers will understand, any gains in price are pure margin wins. As a result, Tradlands also made substantial profit margin gains.

The margin gains dovetailed the revenue growth. Tradlands profits are up +146% vs the prior year.

Better yet, both the margins and discount rates have continued to improve as the brand gains confidence in its pricing power.

Will discounting remain within Tradland’s tactics? Sure. But as a customer acquisition and relationship lever, not as a knee-jerk reaction to overproduction.

Since funding hit styles now takes ~2 months of commitment as opposed to ~6 or more, Tradlands is free to invest for growth. One form of growth investment has already been discussed: funding new styles and product experiments. Without that, the revenue windfall of the hit Porch Ballon Pants would have been harder to come by.

But just as important as investing in product is investing in marketing & distribution.

The founders have invested much of their own time to improving the brand’s digital acquisition efforts. That means learning new tactics, adjusting to Meta’s algorithm changes, and appropriately targeting the consumers who are delighted by Tradland’s products.

To those hard-won learnings, the Patchwork model adds a couple reinforcements:

Both can help Return on Ad Spend (“ROAS”).

Tradlands is experiencing unprecedented momentum heading into Q2’2026 and beyond.

That said, not everything was perfect in their first year working with us at Patchwork.

First, we needed to tighten development and quality assurance processes after a bump in return rates going into Summer ‘25. Thankfully, we’re already back down to mid-teens % return rates.

Second, we didn’t respect the seasonality of certain styles going into Fall and overstocked some of them when we should have been winding down.

Third, we could have done a better job of guiding the founders through the drastic process changes that are necessary to make our agile supply chain platform work.

The first point has been resolved, a plan is in place for the second, and we’re past the growing pains of the third. Further, we see opportunities for the brand in: A) using testing to find hit styles faster, B) assortment gaps & rationalizations, and C) using our extensive analytics platform to inform design directions to maximize the odds of success.

The past couple years have been tough in the apparel industry. A number of brands have gone under and even more have shown signs of distress. Eddie Bauer, Saks Fifth, Francesca’s, Forever 21, Hudson’s Bay, Allbirds - these are just a few of the names that had to wind down operations or liquidate in the year of tariffs and bankruptcies.

Yet there are a number of brands still making massive gains in this market. And while they’re not exactly alike, inventory discipline & supply chain agility have become indispensable tools to many of those successes.

We’re proud to support Tradlands in this change-making era that the apparel industry is in. And we couldn’t be more excited for the future.

Support Tradlands at:
www.Tradlands.com

Patchwork is an agile supply chain platform for apparel brands. We help brands move from large speculative production bets to demand-responsive production — reducing inventory risk and deadstock.

Reach out: [email protected]