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by Guest Post on July 17, 2026
This is a guest post from the Framework Fashion team.
Every year, wholesale brands invest in sales growth, new accounts, and expanded distribution. What gets far less attention, and far less investment, is the operational infrastructure that determines whether that growth is profitable, sustainable, or even possible.
The RepSpark “2026 State of Wholesale for Lifestyle Apparel Brands” put hard numbers on something practitioners in this space have felt for years. The result is what the report calls the Inefficiency Gap: a widening divide between how operationally mature brands believe they are and how their systems actually perform under pressure.
The data is worth sitting with.
The Numbers Behind the Gap
The report surveyed brand leaders generating anywhere from $1M to $50M+ in wholesale revenue. These are not startups figuring out operations for the first time. These are established brands with wholesale teams, sales reps, and existing retailer relationships.
Here is what the data found:
• 81% of brands rate their overall efficiency as Good or Excellent
• 80% of those same brands cite inventory visibility and forecasting as the area needing the most improvement
• Only 19% of brands have their B2B platform fully integrated with their ERP or inventory system
• 24% have no integration at all
• 52% still rely on manual spreadsheets for demand forecasting
• 66% have less than 10% of their wholesale workflows automated or AI-assisted
These numbers don't describe brands that know they have a problem. They describe brands that believe they're operating well, while the underlying infrastructure quietly caps their growth.
Why the Perception Gap Exists
The disconnect between self-assessment and operational reality isn't unique to wholesale. It shows up in any business where revenue growth masks process inefficiency. When sales are increasing, it's easy to attribute success to the right factors - product, relationships, market timing - without examining the operational drag running underneath.
In wholesale specifically, the perception gap persists for a few reasons.
Brute force works… until it doesn't.
Manual processes, spreadsheet forecasting, and fragmented systems can support a business at a certain scale. Teams compensate with extra effort, institutional knowledge, and workarounds that become invisible over time.
The system appears to function because people are making it function. The cost shows up later: in missed reorders, fulfillment errors, inventory write-offs, and retailer relationships that quietly erode.
Digital tools create a false sense of integration.
The report found that 67% of brands identified as having "mostly digital operations." But digital tools and integrated operations are not the same thing. A brand can use a modern B2B ordering portal, a separate ERP, a standalone forecasting spreadsheet, and a disconnected inventory system, and describe itself as digital while operating with significant fragmentation underneath.
The report calls this “Disconnected Maturity” - the appearance of operational sophistication without the underlying connectivity that makes it real.
Senior leaders feel the friction last.
The report noted that 70% of survey respondents held executive or director-level roles. At that level, operational friction typically surfaces as downstream symptoms.
A retailer complaint, a margin miss, a fulfillment report - rather than as visible, day-to-day process breakdown. By the time leadership feels the problem directly, it has usually been compounding for some time.
The Spreadsheet Ceiling
The report introduces a concept worth understanding - the Spreadsheet Ceiling.
More than half of surveyed brands, 52%, rely on manual spreadsheets for demand forecasting. This is not inherently a technology problem. It is a scaling problem.
Spreadsheet-based forecasting can support a business at a certain volume. As order complexity, SKU count, and retailer relationships grow, the data lag and human error embedded in manual systems begin to limit how much revenue a brand can reliably process.
The performance consequences are measurable. The report found that nearly 1 in 5 brands - 19% - reported an on-time and in-full delivery rate below 60%. In an environment where B2B buyers increasingly expect the same speed and accuracy they experience as consumers, a sub-60% OTIF rate is not a logistics problem.
It is a competitive vulnerability.
Incorrect sizing, color, and variant errors, driven largely by manual forecasting, account for approximately 30% of brand returns. That is margin leaving the business through a door that better data would close.
What the Gap Costs in a Volatile Market
The Inefficiency Gap has always existed. What has changed is the cost of carrying it.
The 2026 trade environment has made operational visibility a strategic requirement rather than a best practice. With tariff structures shifting in real time, the report documents the Supreme Court's February 2026 IEEPA ruling, followed within hours by a 10% global tariff under Section 122, raised to 15% the following day. Brands need to make pricing, sourcing, and inventory decisions faster than manual systems allow.
When data lives in multiple disconnected places, the speed of decision-making is limited by the speed of data retrieval. Brands that can see inventory, open orders, and cost structures in a single integrated view can respond to market changes with confidence. Brands operating on spreadsheets and manual syncs are making the same decisions with incomplete information and a time lag.
The report found that 43% of brands are responding to tariff volatility by deepening existing supplier relationships rather than restructuring supply chains. That is a sound instinct. But deepening supplier relationships requires the kind of shared visibility and forecasting accuracy that fragmented systems cannot provide.
The Path Forward
The report identifies a clear direction - brands that close the Inefficiency Gap before their growth demands it will be better positioned than those that address it reactively.
Sixty percent of surveyed brands plan to increase investment in operations and logistics in the next six months. The single biggest area brands want to automate is forecasting and demand planning, cited by 42% of respondents. These intentions signal that the industry recognizes the problem. The question is execution.
Closing the gap requires addressing it in sequence. Before a brand can leverage AI for demand forecasting, it needs clean, centralized data. Before it can offer real-time inventory visibility to buyers, it needs ERP integration that functions in real time rather than through manual syncs.
Before it can scale internationally - and the report shows international orders on RepSpark's platform grew 177% year-over-year in 2025 - it needs fulfillment and order management systems that can support that volume without proportional increases in manual effort.
The brands that will lead wholesale through the next phase are not necessarily the ones with the best product or the most accounts. They are the ones who build operational infrastructure early enough that it supports growth rather than constraining it.
A Practitioner's Perspective
The following perspective is contributed by Jennifer DeClark, Founder of Framework Fashion, an advisory and talent firm that helps lifestyle apparel brands build the operational infrastructure to support wholesale growth.
The Inefficiency Gap that RepSpark's report identifies is something we see consistently in the brands we work with, and it almost never looks like what founders expect.
It doesn't usually show up as a crisis. It shows up as friction. A reorder that takes longer than it should. A buyer who asks a question about inventory that takes two days to answer.
A production calendar that works until a vendor misses a date and there's no buffer built in to absorb it. A line sheet that doesn't reflect current availability because the data lives in three different places and nobody has time to reconcile them.
The brands navigating this well are the ones that invested in operational infrastructure before they needed it, not because they foresaw specific problems, but because they understood that growth amplifies whatever is already in the system. Good processes scale. Workarounds don't.
The Inefficiency Gap is closeable. But it closes from the foundation up, not from the top down.
The full RepSpark 2026 State of Wholesale for Lifestyle Apparel Brands report is available. If you haven't read it, the benchmarking tool alone is worth your time.
Framework Fashion works with lifestyle apparel brands at the intersection of strategy and operations - helping brands identify the right retail partners, navigate the D2C-to-wholesale transition, and build the infrastructure to support profitable wholesale growth.
Learn more about how Framework Fashion and RepSpark work together to support wholesale brands.
FAQ
What is the "Inefficiency Gap" in wholesale operations?
The Inefficiency Gap, identified in RepSpark's 2026 State of Wholesale for Lifestyle Apparel Brands report, is the widening divide between how operationally mature wholesale brands believe they are and how their systems actually perform under pressure. In the survey, 81% of brands rated their overall efficiency as Good or Excellent, yet 80% of those same brands cited inventory visibility and forecasting as the area needing the most improvement.
What is "Disconnected Maturity"?
Disconnected Maturity describes brands that look digitally sophisticated on the surface but remain fragmented underneath. The report found that 67% of brands identified as having "mostly digital operations," yet only 19% have their B2B platform fully integrated with their ERP or inventory system, and 24% have no integration at all. Using modern tools isn't the same as having connected systems.
What is the "Spreadsheet Ceiling"?
The Spreadsheet Ceiling is the point at which manual, spreadsheet-based forecasting stops scaling with a brand's growth. The report found 52% of brands still rely on manual spreadsheets for demand forecasting. As order complexity, SKU count, and retailer relationships grow, the data lag and human error built into manual systems start capping how much revenue a brand can reliably process — nearly 1 in 5 brands (19%) reported an on-time and in-full delivery rate below 60%.
Why do brands rate their efficiency highly if the data shows real gaps?
Manual processes and institutional workarounds can support a business up to a certain scale, so the system appears to function because people are actively making it function. The cost shows up later — in missed reorders, fulfillment errors, inventory write-offs, and eroding retailer relationships — and often surfaces to leadership only as downstream symptoms like a margin miss or a retailer complaint, well after the underlying problem has been compounding.
How is the 2026 tariff environment affecting wholesale operations?
Shifting tariff structures have made operational visibility a strategic requirement rather than a best practice. The report cites the Supreme Court's February 2026 IEEPA ruling, followed within hours by a 10% global tariff under Section 122, raised to 15% the next day. Brands with fragmented, spreadsheet-based data can only make pricing, sourcing, and inventory decisions as fast as they can manually retrieve that data — a real disadvantage when conditions change by the hour.
How can wholesale brands start closing the Inefficiency Gap?
The report points to a clear sequence: clean, centralized data first, then real-time ERP integration, then the fulfillment and order management systems needed to scale — including internationally, where RepSpark saw 177% year-over-year growth in international orders in 2025. Sixty percent of surveyed brands already plan to increase investment in operations and logistics in the next six months, with demand forecasting and planning as the top area brands want to automate (42%).
How do Framework Fashion and RepSpark help brands close this gap?
Framework Fashion provides the fractional strategy and senior talent to diagnose what's broken — customer definition, brand story, sales structure — and RepSpark provides the B2B wholesale platform, ERP integrations, and AI-driven insights to run operations at scale. Learn more about how Framework Fashion and RepSpark work together.
