If you make clothing, you already know timing is everything. Order fabric too early and your cash sits on a shelf for months. Order too late and your best-selling styles land after the season has peaked, heading straight for the markdown rack.
The right demand planning tool closes that gap. It reads your sales history, spots your seasonal peaks, and tells you what to order and when, based on how long each supplier actually takes to deliver.
This guide compares five demand planning tools for apparel businesses that plan around seasonal collections. We've been upfront about who each one suits, including where StockTrim isn't the right fit.
Short answer: For small and mid-sized apparel manufacturers, StockTrim is the best fit if you want automatic seasonality detection, lead times you can set and change per supplier, and fabric and trim orders calculated straight from your finished-goods forecast. Prediko suits Shopify-only brands. Inventory Planner by Sage suits multichannel ecommerce sellers. RELEX and Kinaxis are built for large retailers and enterprises with dedicated planning teams.
Apparel has its own set of planning headaches. Collections rotate every season, lead times change depending on the supplier and the fabric, and one missed reorder window can mean a whole line arrives too late to sell at full price. Generic planning tools often miss these details.
We looked at each tool from the point of view of a small or mid-sized apparel business and checked:
StockTrim is cloud-based demand planning software for small and mid-sized product businesses. It connects to the inventory, ERP, ecommerce, or accounting system you already use, reads your sales history and stock levels, then tells you what to order, how much, and when.
It doesn't replace your inventory system. It sits on top of it and does the planning work your system can't.
How StockTrim handles seasonality
StockTrim analyzes up to 24 months of sales history and forecasts up to 24 months ahead. Its machine learning picks up seasonal peaks and troughs automatically, so your spring knitwear dip and your summer linen spike show up in the forecast without you tweaking anything. You can drill into any product to see the sales history, the seasonal trend, and the reasoning behind each number.
How StockTrim handles shifting lead times
You can set lead times per supplier and per product. If your fabric mill moves from a six-week to a nine-week delivery window, update it once and StockTrim recalculates your reorder points, order dates, and quantities straight away. No rebuilding the forecast from scratch.
How StockTrim handles fabric, trims, and components
With the Raw Materials Forecasting and Multi-Level BOMs add-on, StockTrim forecasts your finished garments, then works back through your bill of materials to calculate how much fabric, thread, zippers, and labels you need. Component forecasts are simply finished-goods demand multiplied by the BOM quantity, so the logic is easy to check.
Here's a simple example. You forecast 1,200 hoodies for spring, and each hoodie uses 2 yards of fleece and one zipper. That's 2,400 yards of fleece and 1,200 zippers before safety stock. Then your fleece supplier pushes their lead time from six weeks to nine. StockTrim moves your fleece order date three weeks earlier, so the fabric still arrives in time to cut and sew.
How StockTrim handles new styles and seasonal changeovers
New collections have no sales history, which is where most forecasting tools fall over. StockTrim can forecast new products using patterns from similar items in your range. Forecast groups let you bundle related products together to manage the changeover between seasonal lines, or the launch of new sizes and colors, and see total demand and what to order across the whole group.
StockTrim features for seasonal apparel
StockTrim pricing
StockTrim publishes its pricing, and it's based on your annual revenue. Plans start from $49 per month on an annual plan, with the BOM add-on priced on top. There's a 14-day free trial with no credit card needed. See the pricing page for your revenue band.
StockTrim pros and cons
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Kinaxis Maestro is supply chain planning software for large enterprises. Its concurrent planning model connects demand, supply, inventory, and capacity, so a change in one part of the plan flows through to the rest without waiting for a separate planning run.
For apparel groups with multi-tier supplier networks and global production, Kinaxis lets planners test scenarios, like a fabric shortage or a port delay, before they commit. It's typically run by a dedicated planning team and rolled out as a professional services project.
Kinaxis features
Kinaxis pros and cons
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Prediko is an inventory planning app built for Shopify brands. It pulls sales data straight from your store and forecasts at the variant level, which is handy for tracking demand by size and color.
It also includes purchase orders and a raw materials module, where you can link finished goods to their materials through a bill of materials and get buying suggestions for those materials. It's built for direct-to-consumer brands selling through Shopify.
Prediko features
Prediko pros and cons
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RELEX Solutions combines demand forecasting, replenishment, allocation, and promotion planning in one platform. Fashion retailers use it to forecast at the store and SKU level across large networks, and RELEX also offers production planning for vertically integrated brands.
RELEX can learn from the gap between expected and actual supplier lead times and adjust safety stock and order timing to match. It's built for mid to large retailers rather than small manufacturers.
RELEX Solutions features
RELEX Solutions pros and cons
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Inventory Planner, owned by Sage, forecasts demand and builds purchase orders for ecommerce and retail brands selling on platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Amazon. It factors in supplier lead times, stockout periods, and seasonality, with settings you can fine-tune by product.
Its open-to-buy reporting helps apparel sellers keep seasonal purchasing within budget. Assembly support is built around kits and bundles.
Inventory Planner features
Inventory Planner pros and cons
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| Tool | Best for | Seasonality | Lead time handling | Fabric and trim (BOM) planning | Setup for SMBs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| StockTrim | SMB apparel manufacturers and brands | Automatic | Per supplier and product, recalculates instantly | Yes, multi-level (add-on) | Hours, self-service |
| Kinaxis | Large enterprises | AI demand planning | Within full supply planning | Yes, within supply planning | Consultant-led project |
| Prediko | Shopify DTC brands | AI forecasting from Shopify sales | Used to set best order dates | Raw materials and BOMs | Fast, Shopify only |
| RELEX Solutions | Mid to large retailers | Automatic | Learns from actual supplier performance | Production planning available | Months-long rollout |
| Inventory Planner | Multichannel ecommerce sellers | Configurable settings | Per product and warehouse | Kits and bundles | Moderate, needs tuning |
Demand planning for seasonal apparel is the process of forecasting how much of each style, color, and size you'll sell in an upcoming season, then using that forecast to decide what to order and when. It combines sales history, seasonal patterns, and supplier lead times so your stock arrives before demand peaks, not after.
If you're new to the topic, our guide to demand planning for SMEs covers the basics.
It starts with your sales history. The software looks at how each style, color, and size sold in past seasons and finds the patterns, like a jump in lightweight fabrics every March or a drop in outerwear after January.
It then projects those patterns forward, adjusting for recent trends and for the styles you've added or dropped. The result is a month-by-month forecast for each product, which becomes the starting point for your purchasing.
For a deeper look at the math, see our complete guide to inventory forecasting.
Because an accurate forecast is useless if it arrives after your order deadline. Your reorder point is the demand you expect during the supplier's lead time, plus safety stock. When a lead time stretches, that reorder point moves, and your order needs to go out earlier.
Apparel is especially exposed here. Fabric, trims, and finished goods often come from different suppliers in different countries, each with its own lead time. A tool that recalculates automatically when one supplier slips saves you from finding out too late. Our guide on how much inventory to order walks through reorder points step by step.
You borrow history from similar products. If you're launching a new hoodie colorway, last season's best-selling colorways in the same fit are a sensible starting point. Good demand planning software does this for you by linking new items to similar products or groups, then adjusting as real sales come in.
StockTrim handles this with new product forecasting and forecast groups, so a new collection gets a starting forecast on day one.
Start with product-level detail. Apparel inventory isn't one-dimensional. You're tracking styles, colors, sizes, and sometimes fabric lots. A tool that only forecasts by category will miss the variation that causes most overstock and stockouts.
Next, check that it connects forecasting to purchasing. A forecast only pays off when it turns into the right purchase order at the right time. The cost of getting that wrong is huge: IHL Group's 2025 research puts the global cost of out-of-stocks and overstocks at $1.73 trillion a year, with supply chain disruption the single biggest cause.
Finally, if you manufacture, make sure the tool plans your materials as well as your finished goods. Our post on component demand planning shows how demand changes filter down through a bill of materials.
Here's the order we'd recommend:
Most tools on this list fall into one of two camps. Enterprise platforms like Kinaxis and RELEX have deep planning power but need big teams, long rollouts, and big budgets. Ecommerce tools like Prediko and Inventory Planner are quick to start but are built around online sales channels first.
StockTrim fills the gap for small and mid-sized apparel manufacturers. You keep the system your team already knows and add automatic seasonality, variable lead times, and fabric and trim planning on top. Your materials and finished goods run off the same forecast, which means less cash tied up in the wrong stock and fewer best sellers selling out mid-season.
If your seasonal buying still lives in spreadsheets, our step-by-step guide to automated inventory planning shows what the switch looks like. Or start your 14-day free trial or book a demo to see it with your own data.
StockTrim is the best fit for most small and mid-sized apparel manufacturers. It detects seasonality automatically, lets you set lead times per supplier, and turns garment forecasts into fabric and trim orders through its BOM add-on, with published pricing and setup measured in hours.
Demand planning software for apparel predicts how much of each style, color, and size you'll sell in a given period, then recommends what to order and when. StockTrim uses machine learning to detect seasonal patterns and calculate order quantities based on your supplier lead times.
Some can, but not all handle them the same way. StockTrim lets you set lead times per supplier and per product, and recalculates reorder points and order quantities as soon as you change one. That matters in apparel, where fabric and trim suppliers often have different and shifting delivery windows.
StockTrim forecasts new products using sales patterns from similar items in your range. Forecast groups let you plan new collections, sizes, and colors together, so you can order for a launch even when the new styles have no sales history.
Yes. With the Raw Materials Forecasting and Multi-Level BOMs add-on, StockTrim multiplies your garment forecast by the quantity of each material in your bill of materials. That gives you fabric, thread, zipper, and label requirements that follow actual projected demand.
Yes, especially if your margins are tight. Seasonal mistakes are expensive: overstock ends up marked down, and stockouts mean missed full-price sales. StockTrim helps you order only what you need, which frees up cash for your next collection.
Inventory management tracks what you have in stock right now. Demand planning forecasts what you'll need in the future. StockTrim connects the two by using your current stock and sales history to generate forward-looking purchase recommendations.
Yes. StockTrim connects directly to Shopify, Cin7, Xero, QuickBooks, Unleashed, and many other platforms, and supports CSV import and an open API. Many apparel businesses keep their current inventory system and use StockTrim for forecasting and purchasing.