Picture this: it's early October, and Sarah, the operations manager at a mid-sized growing apparel brand, is facing a familiar headache. Last year's BFCM sales exceeded projections by 40%, but her team wasn’t ready. Stock ran out three weeks before Christmas, customer orders piled up in the backlog, and the brand lost an estimated $400,000 in revenue.
This year, Sarah decided to “play it safe” and ordered 30% more inventory than last year’s peak. But now she’s facing a different problem: capital is tied up in warehouses, carrying costs are climbing, and demand patterns feel unpredictable. She’s caught between two traps: stock out and lose sales, or overstock and drain cash flow.
Sarah’s situation isn’t unique. Most brands face this same paradox every peak season: how do you hold enough inventory to meet surging demand without freezing capital or leaving yourself vulnerable to markdowns? What if there’s a better way, one that lets you stay lean, responsive, and profitable?
That’s exactly what &Collar discovered. By rethinking how they managed inventory for peak season, they transformed a near-disaster into a 35% revenue lift. This guide walks you through the same principles so you can avoid Sarah’s dilemma and build a peak-season strategy that protects both your sales and your cash flow.
Two weeks before Father’s Day, &Collar, the performance dress-shirt brand known for its viral TikTok campaigns, faced a crisis. Inventory on its top SKUs had dropped to 5%, and the brand was days away from losing thousands of orders.
Instead of paying for emergency air freight, &Collar partnered with Portless. Within 30 days, Portless rerouted 40,000 units directly from the factory to customers, skipping warehouses entirely. The result was a 20× improvement in in-stock ratio, 99.8% pick-and-pack accuracy, and a 35% year-over-year revenue increase.
Read the full case study: How &Collar Saved Their Year with Portless.
That experience reshaped how &Collar plans for peak season. This guide shows how to apply the same principles to your BFCM inventory strategy so you can stay in stock, protect cash flow, and scale sustainably.
The right inventory level balances cash flow with sales potential during BFCM. Traditional rules of holding three to four months of stock no longer work in today’s volatile demand cycles.
Your capital efficiency ratio, which measures inventory investment divided by expected sales, helps determine how much you can safely hold without freezing capital. According to Bank of Canada research on inventory and cash flow cycles, holding excessive inventory limits liquidity and growth.
Analyze your historical BFCM performance, focusing on sell-through rates by SKU, and adjust your forecast based on marketing plans, growth rate, and market trends.
Example guidelines
After adopting Portless, &Collar used this model to align inventory levels with real-time sales velocity rather than long-term forecasts.
Traditional planning creates a cash flow trap. Ordering months in advance locks up capital that could fund marketing, discounts, or new SKUs.
Industry data shows that companies often over-order by 30–40% for peak season, leading to excess warehouse stock and higher carrying costs, according to Investopedia’s overview of inventory turnover.
The true cost of overstocking includes lost agility, forced markdowns, and missed opportunities to respond to actual demand trends. &Collar experienced this before switching to Portless, when bulk pre-positioning left them slow to adapt and exposed to high storage fees.
Not all products deserve equal investment. Focus your capital on high-velocity, high-margin SKUs that deliver the greatest return.
Steps:
Using this model, &Collar concentrated resources on top-performing styles, ensuring continuous stock availability without overcommitting to slower lines.
Timing is critical.
Traditional warehouse-based fulfillment:
Direct fulfillment (Portless model):
With Portless, &Collar compressed its cycle from 120 days to 45–60 days and gained a 15-day faster cash conversion cycle.
Direct fulfillment ships products straight from the manufacturer to the customer. This eliminates the cost and delay of storing products in a warehouse and cuts lead times from 45–60 days to 7–15 days.
&Collar results:
Comparative data on freight methods supports this approach. Sea shipping remains far more cost-efficient than air freight, according to Freightify’s analysis of sea versus air transport.
Emergency air freight can erase your profit margin. During peak season, air freight often costs five to ten times more than ocean freight, according to Globex Ship’s cost comparison.
For a $20 product with a 50% gross margin, air freight can add $5–8 in shipping cost, cutting profitability to as low as 10%. &Collar avoided this by replenishing inventory through Portless instead of using emergency air freight, saving about $8 per unit.
Rolling-wave fulfillment uses live sales data to trigger smaller, more frequent restocks. It keeps cash liquid and inventory lean.
Implementation steps:
With Portless, &Collar replaced one large seasonal shipment with five smaller rolling orders, maintaining a 95%+ in-stock ratio and freeing cash for marketing.
Technology can make or break peak-season logistics. Manual order routing cannot scale when volume spikes tenfold.
Essential integrations:
&Collar connected Shopify to Portless in less than 30 days, giving the team a live view of stock positions and fulfillment accuracy across regions.
BFCM should not be a one-time spike. Use the data and cash generated during peak season to fund Q1 growth.
Action plan:
&Collar reinvested its BFCM cash flow into a Q1 subscription bundle launch that stabilized post-holiday revenue.
How much safety stock should brands maintain for BFCM?
Maintain 15–20 days of safety stock for high-velocity SKUs based on projected daily sales.
What in-stock ratio should brands target?
Top performers maintain 95% or higher availability for best sellers during BFCM.
How quickly can brands implement direct-from-factory fulfillment?
Most can integrate Portless in 14–30 days, depending on SKU count and platform setup.
How do warehouse delays affect BFCM performance?
3PLs often experience 7–10 day receiving delays in November due to peak volume, reducing available inventory when demand surges.
How much revenue do brands lose to stockouts?
Many retailers lose meaningful sales to stockouts, as shown in RetailDive’s coverage of Forrester’s research.
Want to see how &Collar restocked 40,000 units in 30 days and grew revenue by 35%?
Book a demo with Portless or read the full &Collar case study to design your own direct-from-factory fulfillment strategy with Portless.
