Identifying Popular Products at an Early Stage of Sales Season for Apparel Industry

The early phase of launching a new apparel product is critical for gaining insights of its performance and classifying it into different categories such as fast selling, average selling, and slow selling. We propose a new ranking-based method to identify the product popularity that predicts regional and national rankings of products based on sales data at an early stage of a sales season. Our method enables companies to efficiently identify popular products within a remarkably short span of two to four weeks.