Carryover

Carryover is any part of a range that returns from a previous season rather than being newly developed — a style, a colorway, or a color that repeats. It shortens the development calendar and de-risks the buy, and it registers as no newness at all to a customer who already bought it.

Two kinds get conflated constantly. A carryover style is a body that returns. A carryover color is a shade that returns, possibly on entirely new bodies. A new body in a returning color is new to the customer, and a returning body in a new color is also new — it is the returning body in the returning color that quietly fills a range while the team believes the season has been rebuilt.

The failure mode to watch for is a band or a palette that is populated only by carryover. The counts look healthy on the board and the range is empty to a returning customer. It stays invisible unless carryover is visually distinguishable on the card, which is a good argument for making it so before the line review rather than after.

The calendar drives carryover more often than strategy does. Lab dips, bulk dye approvals, and mill matching all need runway, so deciding a palette late defaults a season into carryover with nobody having chosen it. Splitting the palette at lock into returning unchanged, returning re-toned, and genuinely new makes the choice explicit.