Two stories, told roughly a year apart, describe the same company in opposite crises. In one, Gap cannot get enough merchandise onto its shelves. In the other, a partner's warehouses cannot hold everything Gap sends. Both stories are about the same underlying problem: control over inventory.
2021: the year of the empty shelf
Gap attributed roughly $300 million in lost third-quarter sales in 2021 to factory closures and port congestion. The language to investors was one of scarcity: goods stuck upstream, demand the company could not fill, a supply chain working against it.
2022: the year of too much
By the first quarter of 2022, Gap was telling investors it had overestimated in-store demand for larger sizes and let supply run ahead of demand. At almost the same moment, SVES was receiving an 11.2 million-unit Old Navy shipment it says turned out to be more than 90 percent extended-size — far beyond what the purchase-order inventory had reflected.
A company managing a shortage and a company managing a surplus can be the same company, twelve months apart, describing the same supply chain.
The turn nobody fully explained
A shortage and a glut are not opposites in a supply chain; they are often the same forecasting miss, arriving early or arriving late. What has not been publicly explained is how a company managing scarcity in 2021 produced, in the very next cycle, an oversupply large enough that a smaller partner says it could not sell through the assortment as delivered.
Two crises, one set of warehouses
Gap absorbed the 2021 shortage as lost sales on its own income statement. SVES says it absorbed the 2022 glut as physical inventory in its own buildings. The company that controlled the forecast in both years did not carry the downside of either miscalculation the same way the smaller company did.
