Every Sample Sale Is Somebody’s Inventory Mistake

Why a dress ends up at a sample sale, and what it feels like to watch someone buy it.

A few years ago, I swiped up on my For You page and found myself watching an absolutely scathing review of my own product. It seemed to confirm every late-night doubt I’ve ever had (I don’t know what I’m doing, everybody hates me, I’m ugly). I watched the whole thing, and scrolled through endless comments. You’re right, User67239832, the Founder of Hill House IS super annoying, and her style sucks! I agree! After that elaborate self-flagellation ritual, I began to wince each time I saw a “Hill House” video come up, swiping away before I ruined the night for myself.

The algorithm gives, and the algorithm taketh away. Usually I love the strange, twisty journey of my For You page. What I Eat in a Day on a Disney Cruise? My 5-7 before my 9-5? Deep Clean My House with Me? Yes please. But sometimes the algorithm does me dirty.

In later years I’ve developed a thicker skin, thanks to therapy and the ever-present voice of my mother, who thinks I’m perfect and will beat up anyone who is mean to me. I can watch even the most critical review of a new line and take it as constructive feedback for the team.

Last week I discovered a fresh way to inflict harm on myself: watching sample sale hauls from our recent Hill House sample sale. It’s at once incredibly fun (so many people so excited to wear what we made — exactly why I got into this business) and incredibly painful. As somebody who makes a lot of inventory decisions, it’s kind of like seeing my report card in real time. I’ll watch a haul and think: I can’t believe I misordered on that. I’m so mad at myself for that color, or that print, or that size curve.

Someone asked in the comments of a recent video why a brand would even have a sample sale — a fair question if you don’t think about fashion inventory for a living.

So let me answer it!

There are four key reasons a brand has a sample sale.

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Reason One: Overbuy

This is the classic case: the age-old supply and demand equation my business school professors would be delighted to see me implement in relation to a TikTok haul. The brand simply miscalculated how much demand there would be for a product at full price.

When you’re a younger brand, at a smaller scale — this could mean you overbought by 40 units. A few years later, a rounding error could mean 4,000 units.

So why can’t the product just sit waiting for people to buy it, however long that takes?

First: That unsold inventory sits on your P&L at what you paid for it, not what it will actually sell for — which means your books look healthier than reality. Eventually, you have to write down that inventory to what it’s really worth. That write-down hits you as a loss and can paint an ugly financial picture.

Second: Every second that a product sits unsold in a warehouse, a brand is paying for it. You’re paying rent on your product, every single day it doesn’t sell. There’s a physical warehouse in New Jersey that houses all of our product right now. When new product comes in, old product has to go out.

When I worked for a much larger fashion company, I heard a rumor that many brands will, quite literally, burn inventory rather than put it on sale. Not the company itself — this was industry gossip, and I’ve never seen proof. But it’s a practice that’s talked about enough that there’s probably something to it at the extreme luxury end, and it indicates just how few options many brands feel like they have.

If we overbuy, we don’t burn our product. We send it to a sample sale.

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Reason Two: The Size Curve

Brands buy product on a size curve, and use their previous season’s selling to inform the distribution. If you sold a lot of mediums last season, you’ll likely buy more mediums the coming season. If you’re wrong, you’ll end up with too many mediums and you’ll need to sell those off at a discount. They’ll go to a sample sale, where a lucky customer will get them for significantly less than you paid for it.

If you think about the prevalence of GLP-1 use across America, I would love to see how that’s changed the size curves of major retailers across the country. I’m sure you can see it, and I’m sure the size curves are skewing smaller.

Our sample sale last week told me exactly where our own curve was off. I saw the feedback about which sizes were in stock versus which sold out immediately, and had to send a note to the team: we need to fix our curve.

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Reason Three: Print/Color/Style Mismatch

Sometimes a Design Team and a Merchant Team are just… wrong. A color, a print, or a style they thought would fly just didn’t sell at full price. It’s pretty difficult to accurately predict customer behavior! This is where trend forecasting can be really valuable: a trend forecaster can tell you, two years prior, bandana prints are trending — maybe you should make your own scarf print?

We’ve actually been incorrect about prints in the opposite way quite a few times. We’ve thought a print was going to be a little too kooky, a little too crazy, maybe a little too colorful for our customer, and realized soon after that we’d severely under-bought it. Usually the next season, we’ll do a print that’s loosely inspired by the one we didn’t buy enough of.

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Reason Four: The Sample Closet

Brands produce a LOT of samples while they’re in the design process, and these really take up office space. We’re moving offices right now, and we had a ton of samples sitting in our closet here that we needed to get rid of. These are dresses in fabrics we sampled but never produced — a print we considered, a colorway we didn’t commit to.

For example, I saw an Alandra dress we’d made in a blue floral and a white at the sample sale — in a green stripe. We never bought that print, but we did sample it. These pieces are the most fun to find at a sample sale, because they’re truly one of a kind.

Those true samples usually live in our actual office, whereas the other pieces that go to a sample sale live in the warehouse.

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Usually it’s some combination of all four reasons at once. For Hill House, our recent sample sale had a sprinkle of all of them. We don’t have a regular cadence of sample sales because we’re usually waiting for enough inventory to make it worthwhile.

Most brands use a third party to run their sample sales. I think 260 Sample Sale are some of the best in the business. They run sample sales all over the country and they’re incredibly experienced at it — it’s a totally different business than regular retail. As far as I know, many brands don’t run their own. The extreme luxury brands do — Valentino, Louis Vuitton — because they also want to control the list.

Sample sales are amazing. I always tell my friends: go. You can get incredible pieces that a ton of thought was put into at crazy prices. Our sample sale prices are often lower than it actually cost us to make the garment — and 260, not us, sets the prices. There are some real gems in there — not just the prints people didn’t like, but true samples and pieces the team just bought a few too many of.

Every sample sale haul I watch on TikTok is somebody’s inventory mistake. Sometimes it’s ours. I still wince sometimes scrolling through — I can’t believe I mis-ordered that! But the mad-at-myself part is also how we buy better next season. If someone is super excited to get a Hill House dress, I'm always happy — regardless of where they bought it.