No say you estimate that you will sell 10 items of "less common size", you stock 10 items, and hope that you sell all of them. You end up selling 9, you have a remaining 10%.
How does that make a difference?
If you start a sentence with "so what you are saying", and then say something obviously silly ...
The argument would be that it's a large burden to have to write a report if you forage 10 mushrooms and toss one away.
Low volumes, higher fixed costs.
It would be very expensive for the global factory to customize the distribution of sizes manufactured for a retail store in Des Moines, Iowa. The order is tiny and it would require customized logistics, all of which greatly increases cost and complexity.
Or you sell the extras off at a discount and it's fine.
A key insight is that what constitutes an "unpopular size" is a very local phenomenon. Every point of retail sells a different, semi-predictable distribution of sizes. It is much cheaper to ship sizes no one will buy than to manage the logistics of exactly matching local demand for a specific distribution of sizes.
I asked the same question to someone who works in this business and got an eye-opening detailed explanation that made it obvious in hindsight why things the work the way the do. The difference in product cost and logistics infrastructure was not small.
If you make more units, it's cheaper per unit. But doesn't it mean that waste is always a loss?
Production processes that require more production and supply chain customization for each order have significantly higher costs that need to be amortized. It is cheaper to pack and ship identical boxes at the factory than to customize the contents and logistics of each box for every retailer or customer. The more variation and complexity you allow into the supply chain, the more capital infrastructure, equipment, and people you need, all of which must be amortized into the retail unit cost.
The costs of increased supply chain variability and customizability can easily exceed the cost of wasting a few units. You may have wasted hundreds of t-shirts but you also didn't have to invest the millions of dollars in systems and equipment that would have prevented that waste. These are low-margin businesses, everyone is carefully tracking and attributing these costs.
Supply chains in most industries continuously and ruthlessly optimize to squeeze out waste while trying to increase flexibility. The number of items that are produced on demand -- and therefore produce little waste -- has grown dramatically over the last couple decades. However, many goods intrinsically have long, slow supply chains which makes waste all but unavoidable.
That really only applies to luxury designer brands where selling at a discount can dilute the brand prestige, is Gucci, Versace, etc. really destroying unsold inventory at large volumes vs. standard retailers?
Storing the clothes until they come back in fashion is expensive... and some materials really won't be useful after sitting for 10 years anyway. (Elastic bands really are perishable)
False. Not all apparel demand is for street cred, and non-‘season’ clothes can still be fashionable. ‘Last season’ is about wealth signaling and FOMO, and while I do love fashion as an entertainment and my hobby in design of it, the level of flux we have now in everyday clothing shapes and fabrics is openly hostile to the non-wealthy being clothed well. I don’t know if the EU’s regulations will work in full or at all, but I’m cheering them for trying.
A while back someone on Tumblr noted that they would buy and wear a full 360° hue spectrum of 360 t-shirts in spectrum order from 0..359, just to fuck with people’s minds as their shirt is the same color day after day until suddenly “wait, I thought your shirt was green” makes the people around them feel like they’re hallucinating en masse. This joke — well, it’s not a joke, this product with great fit would sell out even at 30° intervals! — T-shirts are shaped the same year after year, and fast fashion has had to resort to mining old brand imagery to try and convince people to buy them. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to find unprinted t-shirts at outlier sizes, because that’s slightly less profitable than waves of shapeless L-XL junk. Yes, I’m fine with Hot Topic collaborations, but they need to stop being the market majority.
For a high-end designer dress, may be better to not manufacture large or small sizes that don't sell frequently.