How an Indonesian athletic footwear brand grew by selling the size, not the style

How an Indonesian athletic footwear brand grew by selling the size, not the style

About the brand

An Indonesian athletic footwear brand covering running, training and football, made largely within Indonesia's own footwear manufacturing base. It sells through its own stores, through multi-brand sports retailers, on its website and across Indonesia's major marketplaces. Every model exists as a size run rather than a single item, typically eight to twelve sizes per colourway, so one launch can amount to well over thirty separately sellable variants.

Background

In footwear the unit of commerce is not the style. It is the size. A customer cannot buy a shoe she likes in a size that is absent, and no amount of demand for the model converts without the specific pair on her foot.

That fact governs the economics, and it punishes a brand twice. The sizes at the centre of the curve sell out first, and they sell at full price, so every week a core size is missing is a week of the best margin the style will ever earn being turned away. What remains at the end of the season is the fringe of the curve, the smallest and largest sizes, which clear only at a discount deep enough to erode the margin the whole run had made. A model can reach full unit sell-through and still lose money if the last third went out at half price.

The brand was strong where brands are usually weak. Product was good, marketing worked, and demand was not the constraint.

Every constraint sat downstream of the size. Stores could see only the pairs in their own stockroom. Online orders were picked from a single warehouse regardless of where stock actually sat. Each marketplace was maintained by hand, one size variant at a time. And allocation pushed broadly the same size curve to every store, whatever that store's customers actually bought.

The brand partnered with Fynd to run stores, warehouses, its website and marketplaces as one operation, with the size as the unit everything is measured in.

Challenges, solutions and impact

Challenge #1: The size that sold was rarely the size in the store

A store carries limited depth. Within a fortnight of a launch the middle of the curve was gone and the wall still looked full, stocked with sizes nobody in that catchment wore. An associate could see her own stockroom and nothing beyond it, so a customer who wanted a model in her own size was told it was finished, and left to buy it from a marketplace on the way home. The brand was losing full-price sales it had already paid to generate.

Solution. Fynd POS gave every store live inventory at size level across the whole network and every warehouse, not at style level. With Endless Aisle, an associate searches for the exact size, sells it from wherever it sits, and has it shipped to the customer or held for collection at a nearby store. The transaction closes on the same visit and the same bill. Fringe sizes stranded in one city became sellable to a customer in another, which is the only way that inventory was ever going to clear at full price.

Impact. Walkouts caused by a missing size fell sharply, and the sales recovered were disproportionately full-price ones. Full-price sell-through improved 26%, because core sizes stayed effectively available for longer and fringe sizes found buyers before markdown season rather than after it.

Challenge #2: Online demand served from one warehouse while the sizes sat in stores

Every website and marketplace order was picked centrally. When the warehouse was out of a size that several stores were holding, the order was cancelled while the stock existed a few kilometres from the customer. In a country spread across many islands the same central-picking model also made delivery slow and expensive for anyone outside Java, and cancellations on marketplace orders carried a rating penalty on top of the lost sale.

Solution. Fynd OMS routes each order against live size-level stock, fulfilment capacity and the customer's location, so a store holding the size can serve a nearby order instead of the warehouse. Orders re-route automatically when the first location cannot fulfil, and delivery partners are assigned by lane so intra-city and inter-island shipments take appropriate carriers. Store teams pick and pack through workflows built for people who are also serving the floor, with capacity limits per store.

Impact. 31% of online orders are now fulfilled from stores. Cancellations caused by phantom central stock largely disappeared, delivery times outside Java improved, and stores became a fulfilment network rather than only a sales channel.

Challenge #3: Every size is a variant, and every marketplace wanted them by hand

Footwear multiplies badly on marketplaces. Each size is its own variant with its own stock number, so a modest catalogue becomes thousands of variants to keep accurate across several platforms. Stock was maintained by hand per channel, which produced the two failure modes of marketplace selling at once: buffers held back so far that available sizes showed as unavailable, and the same last pair sold twice on two platforms. Pricing and campaign calendars drifted apart because each channel was run in its own panel.

Solution. Fynd Konnect connected every marketplace through one dashboard, synchronising listings, prices, size-level inventory, orders and returns from a single place. Stock is held once as a single source of truth and pushed to each platform in near real time, replacing hand-set per-channel buffers with allocation rules the team sets deliberately. Pricing and promotions are managed centrally with per-platform overrides where campaign mechanics require them.

Impact. Overselling and the cancellations behind it dropped sharply, and sizes that were previously buffered out of sight became visible and sellable. The team stopped maintaining variants one platform at a time, and the brand can now add a channel without adding people to run it.

Challenge #4: Every store received much the same size curve

Allocation was driven by style-level forecasts and pushed a standard curve outward. But size demand is local, and a store in a dense urban catchment does not sell the same distribution as one in a university town or a coastal city. Stores were sent sizes they would never sell and starved of the ones they could, which manufactured the broken curves that Endless Aisle was then being used to patch. Nobody could see the imbalance until it showed up as markdown.

Solution. Fynd WMS put size-level discipline into receiving, putaway, picking and dispatch, so the warehouse could act on size rather than style. Replenishment reads each store's own size-level sell-through and refills to the curve that store actually sells, in season rather than at the next buy. Imbalances surface while there is still time to move stock between locations instead of after the season has decided the outcome.

Impact. Stores now hold assortments that reflect their own demand, which reduced both stranded fringe stock and early core stockouts at source. Combined with network-wide selling and store fulfilment, revenue across all channels grew 43%, and the brand reached that growth while holding less redundant stock per store.

Way forward

Next on the roadmap: size-level demand forecasting ahead of the buy rather than only in-season replenishment, tighter integration with multi-brand retail partners so their stock is visible in the same view, and preparing allocation and fulfilment for Ramadan, Lebaran and double-date campaign peaks.

If your challenges resonate with those in this story, it's time to schedule a call with our experts. Whether you're giving store teams visibility of every size you own, fulfilling online orders from stores, keeping size-level inventory accurate across marketplaces, or getting the right curve into the right store, our solutions are designed to streamline your operations and drive growth.

With over a decade of experience in omnichannel commerce and a proven track record with 2,300+ brands, Fynd is here to turn your challenges into success stories. Let's drive your growth together.

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