The only markdown question that matters is when

Ask a planner how deep to mark a style down and you will get a considered answer. Ask them when to mark it down and you will usually get the promotional calendar. That reversal is the whole problem. Depth gets analysis; timing gets whatever date the next email was already scheduled for.

But the markdown decision is a timing decision first and a depth decision a distant second. The single most valuable thing a planner can know is not how far to cut. It is the week a style stops being on track to clear at full price, because that week is a decision point, and every week you miss it the decision gets more expensive and less recoverable.

This post is not about how deep or how often. It is about one thing: finding the trigger week, and trusting it over the calendar you were handed in January. Depth and cadence are real questions and they matter, but they are second-order. They only come into play once you have decided to act at all, and the decision to act has a right week attached to it that has nothing to do with how far you eventually cut or how many steps you take. Get the week right and the rest is manageable. Get the week wrong and nothing downstream can fully recover what you lost by waiting.

Here is the honest definition of the trigger. Take a style's current sell-through rate. Take the stock still on hand and the selling weeks still left in its window. If the current rate, run forward, does not clear the stock inside the window, the style will end the season with residual, and residual clears at markdown. The week that projection first goes negative is the trigger week. It has nothing to do with how old the style is.

This is why the calendar fails. The promo calendar fires on dates that were set before the season started, so it hits every style at the same moment regardless of whether that moment is the right one for any of them. A style that tripped its trigger in week four gets no attention until the week nine event, and a style that never tripped a trigger at all gets marked down in that same event for no reason, giving back margin it would have earned at full price.

Notice what the trigger definition is really doing. It converts a vague worry, this style feels slow, into a specific claim you can check: at the current rate, the remaining stock will not clear in the remaining weeks. That claim is either true or it is not, and it can be computed the moment you have a stable rate. It removes the argument from the room. Instead of debating whether a style feels like it is underperforming, you look at whether its projected finish clears the stock. The trigger week is not a judgment call. It is a projection crossing zero.

Once a style is past its trigger week, it is accumulating a residual it can no longer sell out of at full price. The residual does not sit still. It grows every week the rate stays below what the window needs, and it grows fastest in the weeks you spend waiting for the next scheduled event to give you permission to act.

So the cost of a missed trigger is not a fixed number you can shrug off. It compounds. A style caught in its trigger week needs a small correction because there is still runway to sell into. The same style caught four weeks later has less runway and more residual, so the correction has to be larger to do the same job. Wait long enough and no correction inside the season is enough, and the whole residual rolls into end-of-season clearance.

There is a reason planners miss it anyway, and it is not laziness. The trigger week is the moment a style still looks fine to the naked eye. It is selling. There are units moving through the door every day. Nothing about it screams for attention, because the problem is not that it stopped selling, it is that it is not selling fast enough to finish. That distinction is invisible without the projection, so the style keeps quietly falling behind while it looks perfectly healthy on the daily sales report, and by the time it looks unhealthy the trigger week is a memory and the cheap correction is gone.

That ten-point gap is not a merchandising failure. It is a detection failure. The stock past its window was almost all detectable weeks earlier, at the point its rate first fell short of what the window required. The brands with less of it are not cutting deeper. They are catching the trigger week.

The reason the trigger week gets missed is not that planners do not understand it. It is that computing it for every style, every week, means projecting each one's rate against its remaining window and its remaining stock, and no one has time to do that by hand across a whole assortment. So it does not get done, and the calendar fills the vacuum.

This is exactly the arithmetic to hand to the platform. It projects every style's sell-through against its window continuously, flags the ones whose trigger week has arrived, and surfaces them with the projection attached so the planner can see why. The planner is not asked to trust a black box. They are shown the style, the rate, the runway, and the shortfall, and they make the call the week it actually matters instead of the week the calendar happened to schedule.

What this changes in practice is the shape of the planner's week. Instead of a monthly scramble to build a markdown list under time pressure, they get a short, running feed of styles that just tripped their trigger, a handful at a time, while the rest of the assortment goes untouched. The decision is smaller because it is spread out and it is caught early, and it is better because the projection is on the screen next to it. The planner stops reacting to a calendar and starts responding to the stock, which is the only thing the markdown was ever supposed to be about.

The style does not care what date your next campaign is. It tripped its trigger the week its rate could no longer clear the stock, and that is the week the decision was cheap.

It is worth being clear about what the trigger week is not. It is not a prediction that the style will fail. Plenty of styles trip a trigger early, get a small nudge, and go on to finish clean. The trigger is not a verdict, it is a prompt to look, backed by the projection so the look is fast. Some of the styles it flags will need only a shallow first step, some will need nothing once you check the size or door detail and find a transfer solves it instead, and a few will genuinely need to start their exit. The point of the trigger is not to be right about every style. It is to make sure no style slips past the week when acting on it was still cheap.

Get the trigger week right and depth stops being a drama, because you are acting while a small move still works. Get it wrong and no amount of depth analysis will save the margin, because the expensive part already happened in the weeks you spent waiting. When comes first. Everything else is downstream of it.