A3 at MEXX

Headquartered in The Netherlands, MEXX International is part of US fashion giant Liz Claiborne and has a turnover that exceeds € 400 million a year. The company has more than 6000 wholesale customers and operates around 850 MEXX retail outlets. It offers a complete range of fashion products for men, women, youth and sports. In total, 60 designers from 12 different nationalities contribute to the central MEXX design operation.

Mexx delivers 12 collections a year and is able to achieve 97,5% delivery. It goes without saying that meeting this high performance requires the strictest of planning and forecasting processes.

Five years ago MEXX started to implement A3 for what it calls its OTB (Open To Buy) business. These are core products, which are shipped to the customer within 12 hours of the order being placed. A3 helps MEXX to accurately forecast right down to the style-color-size level.

Next MEXX started to use the A3 Season collection forecast to support the typical fashion process for forward-order selling. MEXX has discovered that by using A3 its purchase of raw materials became much more accurate, while obsolete stocks in finished goods were reduced massively.

MEXX has now 12 collections a year, so a new collection each month. This way of working requires a new approach to the forecasting process. Because of the shortened time-to-market the first forecast has to be made before the first sales orders have come in. The new Blind forecast solution of A3 helps MEXX to identify at the earliest possible stage the top/flop structures in the new collection and a first planning figure per style/color.