Published by The Asor Collective | May 2026
Coming up this June: our full AW26 Trend Report and the BFCM Playbook for fashion founders. More on those at the end of this post.
Every brand heading into production wants the same thing: to sell everything at full price, retire the season cleanly, and move into the next one with cash flow intact and customers satisfied. That is the goal. It is always the goal.
The sale rack is not the plan. It is what happens when the plan meets reality.
Sometimes that reality is internal. A fit issue that slipped through the sample round. A colorway that looked entirely different under production conditions than it did in development. A silhouette that photographed beautifully but didn’t move on the body the way anyone anticipated. A rush to market that compressed the time needed to get the product right before it shipped. A marketing message that didn’t connect the right customer to the right piece at the right moment.
Sometimes the reality is external. A geopolitical crisis that shifts consumer confidence faster than any forecast could model. Tariff changes that reset price points mid-season. A stretch of unseasonable weather that compresses the selling window. An economic environment that pulls discretionary spending tighter with little warning.
Understanding which category a piece of unsold inventory falls into matters. It is the difference between a one-season correction and a systemic pattern that will repeat.
What “Good” Actually Looks Like
Before we look at what sold and what didn’t, it is worth grounding the conversation in what success actually means in this industry.
The benchmark in fashion retail, according to FashionUnited, is a 70% sell-through rate before the sale season begins. 80% or above is considered strong performance. Rates that fall below 60% are a signal that something in the design, production, marketing, or demand-forecasting chain needs attention.
These targets exist because overproduction is genuinely costly, not just to brands, but to the communities on the receiving end of what doesn’t sell. The Business of Fashion and McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2025 report valued the global fashion industry’s overproduction problem at $70 to $140 billion annually in excess stock and inventory mismatches. The 2026 edition went further, identifying leftover inventory as a “persistent challenge” plaguing brands across every segment, and noted that incoming legislation in Europe and California will now attach real financial consequences to unsold stock and take-back requirements.
This is the system context in which SS26 sold, or did not sell.
What Sold at Full Price
The pieces that moved cleanly this season shared a consistent quality: they asked something of the wearer without demanding a persona change.
Jewelry and accessories led every other fashion category. The BoF and McKinsey State of Fashion 2026 report confirmed that jewelry’s unit sales growth outpaced all other fashion peers, and projected that momentum to carry into 2026. When a consumer is watching their budget but still wants to engage with a season, accessories are how they do it. An earring, a sculptural bag, a well-chosen scarf. Lower commitment, lower price point, and still an expression of the season’s direction.
Artisan and handcraft pieces converted well and held their price. Crochet, fringe, and lace in wearable silhouettes performed across boutique and mid-market retail, and they brought customers back. The craftsmanship narrative did not just drive initial conversion. It drove repeat purchase. Consumers are paying a premium to see evidence of skill and intention in what they wear.
Washed linen and natural fiber basics sold cleanly. Well-made, well-fit separates in neutral and earth tones rarely had excess to clear. They anchor a wardrobe without demanding a specific moment, and they hold up in subsequent seasons rather than dating.
Smaller, curated drops consistently outperformed larger seasonal assortments. Brands that edited aggressively and told a clear story around what they released saw better sell-through than those who competed on variety and volume. For founders working at smaller scale, this is worth naming directly: the constraints of limited production are not a disadvantage when framed with intention. They are a commercial advantage.
What Didn’t Land, and Why
The season’s struggles followed patterns that point to specific, avoidable decisions rather than bad luck.
All-over chartreuse is the most visible example of a color trend outrunning its wearability. As an accent, it worked. As a head-to-toe commitment, it required a confidence that most consumers were not prepared to make at full price. Brands that bought deeply into full garments in the color are clearing it now. Those who used it selectively came out ahead. The lesson here is about the difference between adopting a trend as an ingredient and committing it as an identity.
Rococo Revival pieces were a runway story that did not survive the fitting room. Heavily ruffled, brocade-layered, ornate construction is expensive to produce and narrow in its appeal. When the customer for a piece exists primarily in editorial context, that is a design-to-market alignment problem, not a trend failure. The trend was real. The commercial application overreached.
Theatrical maximalism more broadly stalled wherever it asked for a full costume rather than a styling choice. Individual trend ingredients performed well. The complete head-to-toe interpretation did not cross over into everyday purchasing for most markets.
Dad sneakers reached the end of a long and commercially productive run. This is a category timing story rather than a design error. Footwear retailers have confirmed the direction is waning, chunky retro silhouettes are on significant markdown, and the market has pivoted toward lower-profile, more refined silhouettes. Staying with a reliable direction one season too long is its own inventory risk.
The Larger Cost of What Doesn’t Sell
The unsold inventory from any given season does not simply disappear. For the fashion industry at large, a significant portion of what fails to sell eventually finds its way to secondary markets, donation systems, and in too many cases, to places that were never equipped to receive it.
The Atacama Desert in northern Chile has become one of the most documented endpoints of this system. According to reporting from Agence France-Presse, more than 59,000 tons of unsold, returned, or defective clothing arrive annually at the port of Iquique. Of that volume, at least 39,000 tons end up illegally discarded in the desert, according to figures from Desierto Vestido, the Chilean NGO that has been documenting the crisis on the ground for years. An investigation by Atmos magazine found that 85% of the garments coming through the port are brand new, arriving with tags still attached. These are not donated garments. These are production decisions that outpaced demand, moving through the system until they landed in one of the driest places on Earth.
In Accra, Ghana, the Kantamanto Market, one of the largest secondhand clothing markets in the world, receives approximately 15 million garments every week according to the Or Foundation, the US and Ghana-based nonprofit that works directly with Kantamanto traders and communities. The Or Foundation estimates that around 40% of what vendors cannot sell ultimately becomes waste, ending up in landfills and waterways. That figure is disputed by the Ghana Used Clothing Dealers Association, which puts it significantly lower. Both organizations agree that the volume is growing and that the communities living alongside these waste streams bear a disproportionate share of the cost.
A 2023 study from Brunel University London, published in the journal Sustainability, found that the fashion industry emits an estimated 1.2 billion tons of CO2 annually, with projections indicating a 50% increase in its carbon footprint by 2030.
Researchers at University College London and others studying extended producer responsibility policy have framed the downstream crisis in these regions as a structural consequence of overproduction systems, not simply a waste management failure. The garments exist because someone decided to make more than the market could absorb. The rush to market, the pressure to fill floor space, the hedging through volume rather than precision: these are upstream decisions with downstream consequences that land far from the boardroom.
None of this is abstract for independent and sustainable founders navigating production decisions right now. The system that produces the Atacama and Kantamanto situations is the same system that pressures smaller brands to over-buy, over-produce, and discount in order to stay visible in a market that rewards volume. Stepping outside that logic, making less and making it well, is not just an ethical position. It is a business strategy with a different relationship to the sale rack.
What to Expect on the Rack Right Now
For founders buying end-of-season for styling reference, production research, or fabric sourcing, June through July is the window. Here is where the clearance will land:
Full garments in chartreuse and neon yellow. Rococo-coded pieces with heavy ornamentation. Bubble and puff silhouettes in trend-specific pastel colorways. The boldest color-clash pieces from the Glamoratti direction, hot pink with red and cobalt with orange, that performed editorially and undersold at retail. And, at the lower end of the market, an oversupply of cheap fast fashion interpretations: the end of the de minimis exemption and the tariff structure changes on ultra-fast fashion imports mean that excess stock that previously circulated invisibly is now more visibly piling up.
Bridging the Sale Rack Into AW26
Not everything on the rack in June is a dead end. A few categories have clear through-lines into fall.
Oxblood and wine tones carry directly into AW26’s saturated red and wine direction. Look for these in leather, chiffon, or structured wovens.
Fringe and crochet in neutral and earth tones bridge naturally into the heavier, darker knitwear story of fall. The same texture in a different weight reads as a different season.
Lace in black or ivory crosses over cleanly into AW26’s soft-gothic direction. What read as romantic spring becomes considered and gothic-adjacent with different outerwear.
Avoid buying down on all-over chartreuse, underwear-as-outerwear pieces, and bubble hems in spring-specific pastels. These do not bridge and will sit.
What This Season Is Teaching Us
The brands that came out of SS26 in the strongest position were not necessarily the ones who caught the biggest trends. They were the ones who understood their customer well enough to know which trends belonged to them, edited accordingly, and told a clear story around a smaller range.
That is the work. Not chasing the trend cycle. Building the relationship.
Coming in June: Two More Resources
We are publishing two additional reports next month that belong alongside this one.
The AW26 Trend Report
Cobalt blue is the hero color of the season, confirmed across Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, WWD, and Depop’s community data. Slim dark denim is returning for the first time in four seasons. The funnel-neck coat is the outerwear investment piece of the year. And the overall mood, quiet authority over spectacle, lands in direct alignment with what craft-positioned, intentional brands have been building toward. The full report covers color, silhouette, fabric, key pieces, and founder-specific implications. Publishing June 2026.
The BFCM Playbook for Fashion Founders
BFCM 2025 generated $14.6 billion on Shopify over four days, up 27% year over year, per Shopify’s own reported figures. Clothing and accessories was the number-one planned BFCM purchase category at 76% of shoppers, according to NRF data. And yet: the average shopper spent less than the year before, nearly 40% said they would only buy at 50% or more off per Deloitte’s research, and 59% had already started shopping before the BFCM weekend. The consumer is not retreating. They are getting more deliberate. Our playbook covers the data, the behavior shifts, AW26’s holiday fashion priorities, a full October-to-January timeline, and a founder strategy section built for independent brands navigating this environment with intention. Publishing June 2026.
Both reports go to our newsletter community first. If you are not already on the list, now is a good time.
Subscribe to The Asor Collective newsletter to receive both the AW26 Trend Report and the BFCM Playbook the moment they publish, along with ongoing resources built for fashion founders doing this work with care.
The Asor Collective is a concept-to-consumer apparel advisory practice serving early-to-mid stage fashion founders at the intersection of sustainable, slow, and circular fashion.
Sources referenced: Business of Fashion / McKinsey State of Fashion 2025 and 2026; FashionUnited industry sell-through benchmarks; Agence France-Presse Atacama Desert reporting; Desierto Vestido / Atacama Fashion Week; Or Foundation Kantamanto research; Atmos magazine investigation; Andreadakis and Owusu-Wiredu, Brunel University London (2023); Shopify BFCM 2025 data; NRF; Deloitte holiday consumer research.