Opinionated Intelligence
for Apparel teams
Know what’s really selling
How did our dresses sell this season vs. last?
Dresses did well — units are up 14% YoY (weeks 27–39), with the Amelia midi and the Coralie wrap your top two styles.
Three styles are sitting well below the rest.
Dress styles this season, ranked by units
| Style | Units sold | YoY | Sell-through |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amelia midi | 1,240 | +22% | 88% |
| Coralie wrap | 1,110 | +18% | 85% |
| Juliette shift | 880 | +6% | 77% |
| Colette slip | 690 | +2% | 71% |
| Marguerite | 410 | −24% | 41% |
| Seraphine | 340 | new | 38% |
| Odette | 290 | −31% | 34% |
Powered by Sundial’s Root Cause Analysis™
Know why it’s coming back
Why is the return rate on the Amelia midi so high?
It's a sizing problem, not a quality or style problem — and it's isolated to one part of the size curve.
The Amelia midi is returning at 32% vs. a 14% dress-category average, and almost all of the excess is concentrated in sizes M and L — customers order their usual size, find it runs large, and send it back. XS and S return at normal rates, and the style itself sells and reviews well. The fit spec is the issue.
Sells fine everywhere — but comes back in M and L
| Size | Sell-through | Return rate | Top return reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| XS–S | Strong | 13% | — |
| M | Strong | 39% | Too big / runs large |
| L | Strong | 42% | Too big / runs large |
Spot patterns across stores
Is the Coralie wrap underperforming everywhere, or just some stores?
Just some stores — and it's an allocation problem, not a demand problem.
The Coralie wrap is one of your best sellers in warm-climate stores — Miami, LA, and Phoenix are sold out and losing sales — but it's sitting untouched in your cold-weather Northeast stores, heading straight for markdown. Same style, opposite outcomes: it was allocated evenly across the fleet when it should have been weighted to warm markets. You're stocked out where it sells and overstocked where it doesn't.
Mark down at the right time,
not the last minute
Which styles should we mark down now?
Three styles are past the point where full-price sell-through can recover — mark them down this week, in the slow stores only.
The Odette midi has 6 weeks of season left but is tracking to leave ~40% of units unsold at full price; a 20% markdown now clears it while demand still exists. Waiting until end-of-season means a 50%+ clearance cut on the same units.
Know what actually
makes money
Which of our top sellers actually make us money?
Your #2 unit-seller isn't your #2 profit-driver.
The Marguerite dress ranks high on units but falls to the bottom third on margin once markdowns and a 28% return rate are netted out — you're moving volume at a loss. Meanwhile the Coralie wrap sells fewer units but keeps nearly all its margin (full-price, low returns), making it your real profit leader.
& so much more....
For data teams that need
more than a chatbot.
Applied AI team
Former data leaders who set up your metrics, playbooks, and context with you in the first 30 days. Not a chatbot to figure out alone.
Security
SOC 2 Type II certified, HIPAA compliant, and self-hostable, because we know your data is valuable.