Laminir for buying and planning
Every style worked. Not just the twenty you had time for.
Agents review the whole range every cycle — reorder, clearance, open-to-buy — against sell-through, rate of sale, cover, the buying window, and what each style actually earns after returns and acquisition. Each one arrives with the reasoning attached and waits for your call. And when you go to market, the numbers go with you.
OTB need
$1.42M
Outstanding on order
$980K
Still to commit
$440K
By brand
Awaiting your call
Two styles, 1,200 units
ST 72% · window closes in 2 weeks
Nine styles, 340 units
Cover 96w · $84K at retail
Four styles
Insufficient trading history
Approve · defer · override
Illustrative
From pilot. Your figures may differ.
It isn't judgment you are short of. It is hours.
You know what to do with a style once you have looked at it. The problem is that there are eight hundred of them and the window closes on Friday.
Only the top lines get looked at
The best sellers get chased and the worst get marked down. The middle — where most of the range and most of the capital sits — gets reviewed when someone finds an afternoon.
The reorder window closes quietly
By the time a style proves itself, lead time has eaten the season. The decision was available three weeks earlier and nothing surfaced it while it still mattered.
The buy is committed on last season's picture
You write the order in a showroom against a plan set before the season started, and find out in March what it cost. Nothing tells you at the appointment that the brand is already covered.
In the market
The buy is written in a showroom. So that is where the numbers need to be.
Every planning tool hands you a plan before you travel and reads the damage when you get back. The commitment is made in the room, and that is the only moment the position can still change.
Open the brand brief in the appointment
Sales, cover, aged stock, last season's performance and what is still outstanding on order — for the brand sitting in front of you, on your phone, before the rail comes out.
Record what you write, as you write it
The commitment goes in during the appointment, in the brand's own currency at the rate of the day. No notebook to reconcile on the flight home.
Upload the order from JOOR or NuOrder
The order confirmation comes straight in, matched to the commitment you recorded. What you wrote and what the showroom captured are reconciled on the spot, not in March.
Open-to-buy moves before the next appointment
Spend the budget in the room and the next brand's position already reflects it. The overspend is visible while you can still do something about it.
You leave the appointment knowing what it cost you, not hoping.
The buying cycle
Nine steps before you write a single order.
No two buyers work identically — some are far stricter about raising orders properly than others. But loosely, this is the cycle, and most of it is assembly rather than judgment.
How it runs today
With Laminir
Run reports out of the stock system, brand by brand — sales, stock on hand, markdown. Usually several reports, none of which gives the whole view.
Sales, stock, markdown and aged position already read, live, by brand. Nothing to run.
Export the lot into a spreadsheet and rebuild it into something you can read.
No export. No spreadsheet.
Compare how each brand is tracking against the others, and against last season.
Every brand ranked against the others and against last year, with share of business and trend.
Drill into the detail where a brand looks off, to work out whether it is the whole brand or one part of it.
The detail sits behind every brand already, so the question is answered before it is asked.
Talk to store staff. Look at the gaps on the floor and what customers are asking for.
Still yours. No system knows what a customer asked for on Saturday, and it should not pretend to.
Work out, brand by brand, how much should go into forward orders — against a plan set before the season started.
Open-to-buy by brand, against actuals rather than the January plan, with aged stock and outstanding commitment netted off.
Attend the appointments, with a printout or a spreadsheet that was current last week.
The brand brief open in the appointment, current as at that morning.
Place the order in JOOR or NuOrder, send the PDF to the buying assistant, who collates it into a spreadsheet — because the PO is not raised until the stock lands.
The commitment is recorded in the appointment and the order uploads from JOOR or NuOrder. It exists in a system from the moment it is written.
Manually update what is left to spend before walking into the next appointment.
The open-to-buy has already moved. Before the next appointment starts.
Step 08, and why it matters more than the rest
If the purchase order is not raised until the stock arrives, the commitment lives nowhere.
Some buyers are strict about raising the order at the appointment. Most are not, and for good reasons — brands short-ship, deliveries run late, and the exchange rate moves between the order and the invoice. Raising a purchase order you know will be wrong feels worse than not raising one at all.
The consequence is that six figures of committed spend sits in a spreadsheet and a notebook, held by one person, with nothing in the stock system until delivery. There is no audit trail, no second pair of eyes, and the open-to-buy is whatever that file last said it was.
Recording the commitment when it is made is not more admin. It is the difference between knowing your forward position and believing it.
Estimated by a pilot buyer across a multi-brand luxury book.
What changes
The whole range, every cycle, worked before you open it.
Not a list of exceptions to investigate. A decision on each style, with the numbers behind it and the window it closes in.
Reorder before the window shuts
Sell-through and rate of sale against lead time and the weeks left to trade it. A style earning a repeat is flagged while a repeat is still possible, not once the season has moved on.
Reorder only what makes money
Contribution after acquisition, returns and fulfilment sits alongside sell-through. A style that sells through at 72% and loses money on every unit does not earn a repeat.
Clearance while it is still worth something
Cover, aged position and discount depth read together. The exit is proposed at the depth that clears it, not the depth you are forced into two months later.
Open-to-buy that reflects the actuals
By brand and month, against plan, aged stock and what is outstanding on order. Built for indent buying, where the commitment lands long before the sale.
How it works with you
It does the analysis. You still make the call.
Nothing is executed automatically. No purchase order is raised, no price is changed, no stock is moved. Every recommendation arrives with the numbers behind it and three options: approve, defer or override.
Where you override, the reason is kept. It feeds the next cycle, and it is there when someone asks in six months why the buy went the way it did.
Your judgment is the point. The agents just make sure you are applying it to the whole range instead of the part you had time for.
Approve
The decision is recorded and the outcome tracked
Defer
It returns next cycle with the position updated
Override
Your reasoning is kept and shapes what comes next
What you will use
Three live today. Buy one, or run them together.
Alongside what you have
Already running a planning tool?
Keep it. Laminir reads what your range and planning tools already hold rather than replacing them, and adds the layer above: the commercial position the buy answers to, the strategy it is measured against, and the record of what was decided.
A planning tool tells you what the range is doing. Laminir tells you what the business needs the range to do, and holds every buying decision against it.
Nothing to migrate. Nothing to rip out.
Buying and planning