Work backward from the room, not forward from the linesheet. One fitting room in a boutique doing appointment based fittings supports roughly six to eight completed fittings a day. Each fitting needs eight to twelve pieces pulled to produce one or two sales. So the floor stock that keeps a single room moving is the stock that can produce that many credible pulls, in your customers' size band, without sending the fitter into the stockroom twice.
In practical terms that lands most independents somewhere between 350 and 600 units of bras per fitting room on the sales floor and in accessible back stock combined, depending on how tightly your size range is concentrated. That is a starting frame, not a rule, and the rest of this piece shows how to derive your own number instead of borrowing mine.
Every figure below is arithmetic from assumptions you can replace with your own. Nothing here is a survey result. Put your own appointment log next to it and the numbers change.
Counting real fitting capacity per day
Start with minutes. A first time fitting with a new customer, done properly, runs 45 to 60 minutes including the conversation, the measure, the pulls and the checkout. A returning customer who already has a confirmed size runs 20 to 30.
Take a nine hour open to close day with one room. Subtract 30 minutes for opening prep and 30 for close. That leaves 480 minutes of room time. At a blended 45 minutes per fitting including turnover, you get about ten slots on paper.
You will not hit ten. Between no shows, a fitting that runs long, and the walk in who needs ten minutes at the counter, real completed fittings per room per day land closer to six or seven. Use seven for planning and treat anything above it as a good day rather than a target.
Two rooms do not double this unless you have two fitters. One fitter running two rooms gains maybe two fittings a day from overlapping the try on time, not seven.
Keep reading: What does a full Saturday on the fitting room floor teach you about staffing levels?
Styles and sizes pulled per appointment
Here is where floor stock gets consumed. A competent first fitting pulls across at least three brands, because the point is to find the cut that suits her shape, not to sell the one you have most of.
A typical pull looks like this: three to four styles at the size you estimated, plus a sister size on either side for two of those styles, plus one or two pieces in a second silhouette once you see how she sits in the first cup. Call it ten pieces on the rack, four of which she actually tries.
Now multiply. Seven fittings, ten pieces each, is 70 pieces handled per room per day. Those pieces come back to the floor, so this is not consumption in the inventory sense. It is a requirement that 70 pieces exist and are findable, concentrated in the sizes you fit most.
Why concentration beats breadth
If your size range spans 30A to 44K on paper, that is well over a hundred size combinations. Carrying one piece of each across four styles is 400 units that cannot produce a single decent pull, because the customer in a 36G finds exactly four options and two of them are the wrong cut.
The stock that makes a room work is deep in a narrow band. Pull your last twelve months of confirmed fittings, rank the sizes by count, and you will usually find that eight to twelve size combinations cover more than half your fittings. Those get depth. Everything else gets one, or gets special ordered.
Core versus fashion split in units
Core is the smooth t shirt bra in nude, ivory and black that a customer replaces every eight months. Fashion is the seasonal color, the lace, the piece she buys because she wants it.
Core carries the fitting. Fashion carries the second sale and the average ticket. A workable split for a fitting led boutique is roughly 70 percent core units to 30 percent fashion units, with the dollar split closer to 60/40 because fashion carries a higher retail.
Core can be bought in season and reordered. Fashion cannot, which is why it needs to be bought shallower and reviewed harder. If your fashion units are creeping past 35 percent, check whether last season's colors are still hanging on the floor.
Keep reading: How do I actually measure a customer who has never been properly fitted before?
Sell through targets by size band
Do not judge sell through on the whole buy. Judge it by band, because the bands behave completely differently.
| Band group | Role on the floor | Reasonable full price sell through by week 12 |
|---|---|---|
| Your top eight sizes | Depth, drives most fittings | 65 to 75 percent |
| The shoulder sizes either side | Coverage so the pull is credible | 45 to 55 percent |
| Range edges, one piece each | Proof you can fit her at all | 25 to 35 percent |
Those are planning targets you should adjust after two seasons of your own data. The important part is the structure: an edge size that sells 30 percent is doing its job, and marking the whole style down because the 30D moved slower than the 34F is how you give away margin you did not need to give.
Inventory turn and weeks of supply math
Weeks of supply is the number that actually controls your buy. It is your on hand units divided by your average weekly unit sales.
Work an example. Say one room produces seven fittings a day, five days of real trading a week, converting at 55 percent, at 1.6 bras per converted fitting. That is 7 times 5 times 0.55 times 1.6, which is about 31 bras a week.
At a target of 14 weeks of supply, on hand bras should be about 434 units. At 12 weeks, 372. At 16 weeks, 496. That range is the 350 to 600 frame from the top of this piece, and now you can see exactly which assumption moves it.
Turn follows directly. Fifty two weeks divided by 14 weeks of supply is a turn of about 3.7 times a year on bras. If your actual turn is under 2.5, you are carrying too much or buying too broad. If it is over 5, you are almost certainly missing sales because the size she needs was not on the floor.
Check it against your accountant's number
Turn is usually calculated at cost: annual cost of goods sold divided by average inventory at cost. If your bras cost 33 dollars average and you sell 31 a week, annual COGS on bras is roughly 53,000 dollars. Average inventory of 434 units at 33 dollars is about 14,300. That gives a turn of about 3.7, which agrees with the weeks of supply figure. When the two methods disagree, the assumption that is wrong is usually the conversion rate.
See how FitRoomLog handles this for lingerie and bra fitting boutiques
Markdown timing before it eats your margin
The mistake is waiting for the season to end. By then the size that would have sold at 20 percent off in week ten needs 50 percent off in week twenty.
A simple rule you can run from a weekly report: at week ten, look at any style under 40 percent sell through. Take the first markdown then, at 20 to 25 percent, and take it on the slow sizes only rather than the whole style. At week sixteen, anything still under 60 percent goes to 40 percent off. At week twenty two, clear it.
Marking down by size instead of by style is the move most boutiques skip. If the 34DD is gone and eleven 38C remain, discounting the 34DD you no longer have costs nothing and discounting the 38C is the entire point.
Building the open to buy from these numbers
Open to buy for the coming month is planned sales, plus planned end of month inventory, minus opening inventory, minus what is already on order.
Continue the example. Planned sales of 31 bras a week is about 134 a month. Target weeks of supply of 14 at 31 a week is 434 units at end of month. Suppose you open the month with 410 units and have 60 already on order.
134 plus 434 minus 410 minus 60 gives 98 units of open to buy for the month. At 33 dollars average wholesale, that is about 3,230 dollars. Now split it 70/30 core to fashion: roughly 69 core units and 29 fashion. Then allocate the core units across your top eight sizes by their share of last year's fittings, and the fashion units shallow across the shoulder band.
That is a buy you can defend to a rep, because every line of it traces back to how many women you can actually fit in a day.
Getting the inputs you need
Every number above depends on inputs most stores do not capture: confirmed size by customer, which brand and cut she was fit into, conversion per fitting, and repeat interval. Guess those and the whole model is decoration.
FitRoomLog keeps the fit history per customer, so the size ranking that drives your depth is a report rather than a recollection, and restock alerts tell you when a size that actually sells has landed. Run your next open to buy off your own fitting book instead of last year's invoice totals.
