What a Showroom Director Wishes Founders Knew Before They Go Into Wholesale
An honest conversation about readiness, the numbers buyers work to, and why most brands struggle at wholesale long before the product is ever the problem.
Applies to all fashion segments: apparel, accessories, handbags, jewellery, etc.
I wanted the unglamorous version of what actually has to be true before wholesale can work for you. Here is what came out of it.
Most founders I speak to picture wholesale as a growth button. You get into a good showroom, you get in front of buyers, you collect orders, and you scale. It's a completely reasonable picture, but the trouble is that almost none of the mechanics are visible from the outside, so the version in your head and the version that plays out rarely line up.
So I got talking with someone who works the other side of that button: a wholesale sales director who has spent more than a decade placing independent designers with buyers across the US, Europe, the UK and Asia. This wasn't a formal interview. It's the honest, insider view of how wholesale actually works that founders rarely get to hear, from someone who sees, up close, the moment a brand's business either holds up or comes apart under an order. For many of the brands he takes on, he is the first agency ever to handle their sales.
What a showroom is looking for
The first thing worth understanding is what a showroom director is filtering for, because it's rarely the thing you'd assume.
"Most of them don't know how pricing is actually built," he told me. "Even the ones who say they know — the moment we start preparing a collection, it turns out the price is built wrong." He described a familiar pattern, where a genuinely beautiful collection with strong commercial potential sits on top of a cost structure that simply cannot survive being sold to a buyer.
What struck me was his counter-example. He recently gave the green light to a brand at the very earliest stage, with a first collection still at sampling, no website and no Instagram. On paper, the brand looked unready. He took it anyway. "The team and the designer had serious background, they'd worked with other brands, and the prices were built very well. Everything as it needs to be."
It's worth pausing on that. He passed on polished brands with an audience and said yes to an invisible one, because the economics were clean and the people understood production. If you've been pouring your energy into the feed, the launch and the aesthetic, none of that is wasted, but to the people who can actually place your orders, readiness sits somewhere less visible: in whether your numbers and your operations can carry the weight of a buyer saying yes.
The fashion calendar
This is the part I wish every founder understood before they chase a showroom placement.
Wholesale runs on a fixed rhythm, twice a year, tied to the buyer visit schedule. For the autumn selling season, he needs collections ready and photographed by roughly mid-July. Then orders are gathered in one market, and then the brand travels to the next and gathers orders again. Each of those windows stacks pressure onto production and onto the founder.
Example: Operational Timeline in the Fashion Business
"Not all brands are ready for that timeline," he said, plainly. It is why he didn't run a June showroom this year, because the brands weren't ready, and he decided the load, the budget and the stress weren't worth forcing. When I asked how reliable designers are with these deadlines, he laughed a little. "You never know what's coming next time. We agree schedules, we talk it all through, and then what happens on the ground is often different."
This is one of the hardest parts, and it catches out people who are doing everything else well. Hitting a date you didn't set, season after season, asks a great deal of a small team and a young supply chain. The founders who tend to thrive in wholesale aren't necessarily the most creative in the room; they are the ones whose calendar and manufacturing can absorb a season that runs on someone else's clock, and the reassuring part is that this is a capability you can build on purpose rather than a talent you either have or don't.
Wholesale is a two-season commitment, not a test you run once
Founders often want to "try" a showroom for one season and see what happens. He won't do it, and his reasoning is worth borrowing.
He asks for a minimum two-season commitment. Partly it is about data: "You need to work two different seasons to get anything close to a full picture." Partly it is reputational, and it matters for everyone involved. Buyers build their own visit schedules around the brands they expect to see again. "When we present a brand, buyers write to us asking for the dates and the address. If a brand changes showrooms every season, that's a reputational risk for them, and it's awkward for me too."
Budget for wholesale the way you would budget for any serious distribution channel, as a multi-season investment with a preparation cost, rather than a single experiment you can walk away from if season one is slow.
The money math nobody walks you through
This is the part I most wish someone sat every founder down and explained early, because it's where good products run into trouble, and it's almost never through carelessness. Most of us price the way we've been taught to think about price, which is from the customer's side.
Buyers work to roughly a 2.7 markup. On a dress that retails at $1,000, the buyer pays the brand around $370. So the test that matters isn't whether the piece sells at $1,000, it's whether your costs still leave you a profit at $370. Plenty of beautiful products were only ever priced to work at full retail, and there's nothing wrong with that; it just means the wholesale version of the sum hasn't been done yet, and it's far better to do it now than to discover it in a showroom.
A few more numbers came out of the conversation, and all of them need to live in your financial model before you approach anyone:
Payment terms: around 90% of his buyers actually buy the goods rather than take them on consignment, typically on 30/70 terms — a 30% deposit that funds the start of production, with the remaining 70% paid before shipping.
Delivery window: usually two to three months, and sometimes four. Everyone wants it faster.
Reorders are where the money is made. "In the US especially, buyers reorder more than they order the first time," he said. That means a brand that can't produce quickly, or hold sensible stock, leaves its best revenue on the table. Being genuinely ready for reorders is one of the strongest advantages a small brand can have, and one of the rarest.
None of this is exotic, and none of it is obvious until someone shows you. Plenty of founders I speak to had set a retail price long before anyone mentioned a 2.7 markup, a 30% deposit, and a three-month gap between paying for production and getting paid in full. That cash gap is where a lot of brands feel the strain, not because they did anything wrong but because nobody drew them the timeline.
On consignment
Because consignment feels like a soft, low-risk entry, founders are drawn to it. He actively steers brands away from it.
"Your cash is frozen," he said, "and honestly you earn less than everyone else in the chain." His point is one I make constantly from the finance side, because in classic retail the retailer already captures the most margin, so a model that also traps your working capital in unsold stock on someone else's floor is rarely the deal it appears to be. There are narrow cases for it, such as a brand trying to expand faster than its production can fund, but as a strategy he doesn't recommend it, and neither would I.
How much product you actually need
This is a practical question, because it's genuinely hard to guess the number, and most of us land too high or too low while both feel right at the time.
The optimal presentation, he said, is around 35 units across two rails, which is enough for a buyer to read the collection with "air" around the pieces so it doesn't look crammed. Brands routinely turn up with 60 to 90 units, and the overflow goes into the backroom. Voluminous pieces need more space, so the count drops.
There are two clarifications that matter here. "Units" means styles or categories, and it does not mean colourways. Buyers select from available colours off a single sample, so carrying one model in five colours just eats rail space for no reason. And for accessories such as bags, shoes and jewellery, one, three, or even five designs is too thin, because buyers want variety before they will commit.
The one at the top end is worth sitting with gently. If you're producing 100-plus units a season, that usually comes from a good instinct, because you want range, you want to look serious to a buyer, and you want to give them choice. The hard question underneath it is whether the buyer traffic is there yet to move that volume, because if it isn't, all that lovely range ends up as cash tied up in stock. It's worth being honest with yourself about which one you have right now, genuine demand or the hope of it. Both are normal at different stages, and they simply call for very different production decisions.
Positioning: product-market-budget fit
One line from him reframed something for me. Even when buyers love a collection, he said, "it doesn't mean they'll buy it — there are budgets, and there's nothing we can do about that. I could push a buyer as hard as I like; if the budget isn't there, it isn't there."
We talk endlessly about product-market fit, and wholesale adds a third term, which is budget. His showroom deliberately positions brands to avoid competing head-on with established premium names, because "a new name against established premium has no chance." The job, as he described it, is to match a brand to buyers by price and aesthetic, in a market that currently has appetite and money for a new name. That is a much narrower target than "buyers who like my work."
A note on China, if it's on your map
This is worth knowing before you romanticise it. Pre-Covid, he said, Chinese buyers had a strong appetite for foreign brands. Post-Covid, there has been a boom in local designers, and for many Chinese buyers local names are now the first priority. China is a genuinely different game now, with a different strategy, and it is not a copy-paste of the Western showroom approach.
The pattern underneath all of it
Near the end, I asked him what he sees in the brands that don't make it. His answer could have come out of my own mouth.
"Mostly these brands don't scale," he said. "The founder's ambition is huge, and that ambition closes off every other voice trying to reach them. They want a lot at once — lots of sales, lots of orders — but it's built wrong from the start, and they won't change it, because at this stage it more or less works." And then he named the part that matters, which is that if the business isn't set up properly and a large order finally lands, "the brand can't withstand the load, because it's built wrong. And most of the time, it closes."
This is the pattern I see from the financial side, described from the sales side by someone who has watched it happen for over ten years. The order they wanted becomes the thing that breaks them, not because demand was missing but because the foundation underneath the demand was never built.
Fashion is often sold to us as a purely creative pursuit, which is part of why so many of us fall in love with it in the first place. What this conversation kept circling back to is how heavily wholesale leans on the business underneath the beauty, meaning your pricing, your production, your cash flow and your calendar. The creativity is what gets you invited into the room. The business is what lets you stay there once a buyer says yes.
Before you chase a showroom, pressure-test these
This is a quick readiness check, drawn straight from the conversation. These aren't pass-or-fail, and a "no" on any of them isn't a verdict on your brand, so treat them as the questions worth sitting with now, calmly, rather than working them out mid-season with a buyer waiting.
Does your product still make a profit at a 2.7 markup? The buyer pays about $370 on a $1,000 retail item, so model it before you go further.
Can you fund production on a 30% deposit and wait months for the balance? Map the cash gap before you commit to anything.
Can you deliver in two to three months, and can you reorder fast? Reorders are where the money is made.
Do you have around 35 sellable styles, with variety? That means styles rather than colourways, and it means more than three designs.
Are you positioned to avoid a head-on fight with established premium? It needs to work on both price and aesthetic.
Can you commit to at least two seasons? Wholesale is a channel, not a one-off test.
Is your production reliable enough to hit a date you didn't set? This is the one most worth being honest with yourself about.
If you read that list and felt something tighten at the numbers questions, that is not a bad sign, and in fact it's the useful one. It means you're taking the channel seriously, and every one of these is fixable while you still have time and space to fix it, well before you're standing in a showroom with a buyer.
The work I do with founders is exactly this, which is building the financial structure underneath the brand so that a yes from a buyer becomes growth instead of the order that breaks you. We model the unit economics, the cash flow through a wholesale season, and the growth plan across your distribution points, so you walk into that room already knowing your numbers hold.
If you're seriously considering wholesale in the next year, a good first step is simply to pressure-test your pricing and your margins against those buyer numbers. And if you'd like a second pair of eyes on whether your business could comfortably carry the channel, so that you're deciding from clarity rather than crossing your fingers, that is exactly the kind of conversation worth having now, while there is still room to shape it.
Ready to find out if your brand can actually carry wholesale growth?
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