Ruth Adebayo
Covers wholesale, order books and the relationship between brands and retailers.
Articles by Ruth Adebayo
How did ABOUT YOU and SCAYLE turn commerce technology into a B2B business?
SCAYLE began as the platform behind ABOUT YOU and is now a software unit inside Zalando's B2B business, adding AI content tools. What the published figures show and what brands should take from it.
How to make your B2B fashion catalogue machine-readable for buying agents
Procurement and buying agents need structured access to wholesale stock, prices and terms. A practical guide for fashion brands to expose their B2B catalogue safely to AI agents.
GEO for B2B: how do wholesale fashion brands get found by retail buyers using AI?
Store buyers increasingly research new labels with AI assistants before they visit a trade fair or showroom. Wholesale brands need public, factual information that those assistants can find and cite.
AI clauses in B2B contracts: 20 questions for software vendors and retail partners
From model training on your data to logging and liability, the questions fashion brands should ask AI vendors and wholesale partners before signing, mapped to the AI Act.
What can AI learn from buyer behaviour in a digital showroom?
Every click, wishlist and draft order in a digital showroom is a demand signal. How AI turns that behaviour into early pre-order insight, and where the data misleads.
How can AI give early warnings on order book health during a selling campaign?
Comparing this season's order intake with past campaigns, by day, account and style, lets AI flag shortfalls weeks before the book closes. What works, and what still needs judgement.
How can AI predict which retail accounts will churn, and what can reps do?
Wholesale accounts rarely announce that they are leaving: orders shrink, reorders stop, contact fades. How churn models read those signals, how reliable they are, and how reps should respond.
Wholesale returns and claims: how AI helps settle retailer disputes faster
Shortages, damages, compliance chargebacks and returns allowances quietly erode wholesale margin. How AI can match documents, spot patterns and speed up claims with retail partners, and what it cannot fix.
How can AI agents handle wholesale order status, claims and delivery queries?
Retail buyers ask the same questions every season: where is my order, when does it ship, how do I file a claim. How AI agents can answer them, what data they need, and where humans must stay involved.
How can AI help fashion sales reps prepare, sell and follow up?
From account briefings to appointment notes and re-order nudges: what AI can take off a wholesale rep's desk, what buyers still expect from a person, and the risks.
How does AI change the digital showroom in fashion wholesale?
Digital showrooms moved collections onto screens. AI adds personalised pre-selections, natural-language search, generated imagery and behavioural insight, with new limits to manage.
How does AI customer segmentation work for wholesale accounts?
Static A, B and C tiers miss how retail partners actually behave. AI segmentation groups accounts by buying patterns and potential, if the data and governance are right.
How can AI automate order capture from emails, PDFs and spreadsheets?
Many wholesale orders still arrive as attachments that someone retypes. AI can read and structure them, but size grids, product matching and validation decide whether it works.
How is AI used for credit limits and payment terms in B2B fashion commerce?
Wholesale brands extend credit to every retailer they ship to. How AI risk scoring works, what data it needs and where the legal and practical limits lie.
AI agents in B2B order entry: what will retailers' buying bots expect from brands?
Retail buyers are starting to use AI agents to search, compare and order. What those agents need from fashion brands, from machine-readable catalogues to reliable confirmations.
How to run remote buying sessions with key accounts in a digital showroom
Remote buying appointments can save travel and time for brands and key account buyers, but only with careful preparation, the right data and a clear role for physical samples.
AI copilots in sales apps: which features do reps actually keep using?
After the launch demo, which AI copilot features survive in a wholesale rep's daily work? What the research shows about time savings, trust and the features that fade.
What is social listening, and how can wholesale brands use it to spot trends?
Wholesale brands sit far from the end customer. Social listening can narrow that distance, if it is tied to product attributes and key account conversations.
What will retailers ask brands for under the DPP? A wholesale checklist
Retail partners will need product identifiers, verified sustainability attributes, origin evidence and data feeds from their wholesale brands. A checklist of what to prepare before the textile passport applies.
What is fashion wholesale? How brands sell collections to retailers
Wholesale is the business of selling a collection to other businesses before the consumer ever sees it. Here is how the model works, who buys, and why it still anchors many fashion brands.
Pre-order vs re-order: the two rhythms of the fashion order book
Pre-orders set the shape of a season; re-orders react to how it is actually selling. Understanding both is essential for planning stock, cash and production.
How a wholesale season works, from line release to delivery
A fashion wholesale season is a long chain of dependent steps. This guide walks through each stage, who is involved and where things typically go wrong.
Sell-in vs sell-through: the two numbers every brand should watch
Sell-in tells a brand what retailers bought. Sell-through tells it what consumers actually took home. Reading the two together reveals the true health of a wholesale business.
Replenishment in fashion: how never-out-of-stock programmes work
Never-out-of-stock programmes keep core products permanently available to retailers. They look simple from the shop floor, but depend on disciplined planning, stock and data.
What a good B2B ordering portal needs: a practical checklist
A B2B ordering portal should make it easier for retailers to buy than to pick up the phone. This checklist covers the features and foundations that make the difference.
Digital showrooms explained: what they are and when they work
A digital showroom presents a collection to buyers on screen instead of on a rail. It can widen reach and speed up decisions, but it does not replace every physical appointment.
Sales apps for fashion field reps: what matters on the road
Field reps sell in stockrooms, trade fair stands and hotel suites, often with poor connectivity. A sales app has to work there first, and look good second.
Why trade fairs still matter in a digital wholesale world
Digital tools now handle much of what fairs once did, from presenting collections to writing orders. Yet the fair floor still does jobs that a screen struggles to replicate.
Order minimums, payment terms and delivery windows explained
The commercial terms behind a wholesale order shape cash flow, risk and the relationship on both sides. Here is how minimums, payment terms and delivery windows work in fashion.
Key account management in fashion wholesale: a practical guide
A handful of large retail partners often drive a disproportionate share of a brand's wholesale business. Managing them well takes structure, data and senior attention.
The wholesale KPIs that actually matter
Wholesale teams can measure almost anything. The useful KPIs are the ones that explain revenue quality, account health and execution, and that lead to a decision.