Every seasonal category has the same anatomy: a demand spike you can see coming a year away, and a supply chain that still manages to be surprised. The difference between a good season and a great one is rarely the product — it's the calendar discipline of the sixteen weeks before the peak.
Weeks 16–12 Out: Numbers Before Opinions
Last season's story, told by store-level data: what sold where, what stocked out and when, what came back as markdown salvage. Build this season's forecast from that base plus distribution changes — every new door is incremental volume the naive year-over-year number misses. Lock vendor commitments here, while lead times are still friendly.
Weeks 12–8 Out: Sell the Season In
Retail commitments close in this window — displays, features, incremental facings. Arrive with the sell-story built from last year's sell-out (their stores, their numbers), not a national trend deck. This is also when the promo plan gets its baseline math done — before the money is committed, not after.
Weeks 8–2 Out: Pipeline Without Loading
Ship to plan, watching the sell-in/sell-out gap weekly by account. The classic seasonal failure is here: shipping the whole season in two weeks to make a month's number, then discovering in the post-season returns what the register never absorbed. Fill the pipeline at the rate the pipeline drains.
The Two Weeks That Decide Everything
The week before peak and peak week itself are where seasons are actually lost — a display that never got built, a store that sold out Thursday and restocked Tuesday. This is maximum-field-presence time: audit routes weighted to the highest-volume doors, restock escalation paths agreed with retail ops in advance. And in the quiet week after: the honest post-mortem, written while it hurts, because it's next year's week-sixteen input.
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