As a brand known for its craftsmanship and heritage, Monsoon has navigated a successful turnaround by blending its creative DNA with rigorous, data-led decision-making.

Despite a challenging macroeconomic backdrop, parent company Adena Brands strengthened trading performance, achieving 3.7% year-on-year sales growth to £212m and ending 2025 debt-free, while Monsoon and Monsoon Childrenswear returned to growth and the digital business delivered meaningful profitability gains.

Over the past five years, by partnering with EDITED, the brand has sharpened pricing decisions and built more confident, trend-led assortments, improving margins and reducing risk across key categories.

Insights shared by Lisa Cursely, Buying Manager at Monsoon, highlight how the buying team leverages EDITED to make faster, smarter commercial decisions.

Sharpening Pricing, Trading and Buying Decisions

EDITED played a key role in helping Monsoon return to profitability by building a more robust pricing architecture, particularly in key sales-driving categories such as denim and outerwear. Quickly monitoring pricing and conducting benchmarking analysis using EDITED to ensure confident pricing decisions and protect margin.

“EDITED gave us a clear view of where our pricing sat in the market. It allowed us to protect margin while remaining competitive, especially within denim, as we were able to benchmark where we sat in comparison to our competitors.”

Market insights also highlighted an early shift toward lightweight outerwear. Acting on this trend enabled Monsoon to capture early-season demand, delivering improved performance while holding less stock year-on-year.

“Spotting the move into lightweight jackets early became a highly lucrative strategy and helped us drive performance with lower inventory risk.”

EDITED’s real-time market tracking further supported more agile buying and merchandising decisions, helping teams monitor new-in launches across the market and providing immediate context for Monsoon’s own launches and trading performance.

“Tracking new-in across the market helped us understand what was launching, when, and how it was performing, ultimately allowing us to react faster.”

These insights also revealed broader seasonal shifts, including year-on-year changes in Christmas launches and a shift away from ‘sparkle’ attributes and toward gifting and cold-weather categories, helping Monsoon stay aligned with evolving customer demand.

Improving Full-Price Sell-Through Through Trend Insight

EDITED insights directly influenced buying decisions that improved full-price sell-through, particularly around color and trend evolution. EDITED’s color insights identified chocolate brown as a key growth opportunity.

“EDITED highlighted chocolate brown as a rising color trend across the market, giving us the confidence to invest more heavily.”

As a result, Monsoon bought deeper into chocolate brown than traditional core colors such as black and navy. A move that contributed to their strong commercial results.

“Without that market validation, we wouldn’t have had the confidence and data to have leaned in as strongly as we did.”

Alongside color, EDITED provided visibility into print, pattern, and broader trend evolution, helping shape more commercially successful and relevant ranges.

Monitoring the Competitive Landscape Each Week

Buying teams at Monsoon use a variety of EDITED features to monitor the competitive landscape and stay closely aligned to UK market movements and key opportunities.

EDITED Research is used weekly to track evolving market trends and emerging opportunities.

“The Trending Digest articles in EDITED Research are invaluable for giving us top-line market insights, helping us stay ahead and informed at the start of each week.”

Runway collections each season are reviewed through EDITED, helping translate relevant catwalk trends into commercially viable products for the Monsoon customer. 

“EDITED gives us a clear picture of how competitors are positioning, pricing, and promoting,  especially during peak periods, which are critical to our overall trading performance.”

Planning for Future Growth

Looking ahead, as Monsoon continues the positive momentum of the past year and growth path with new store openings, online expansion, and brand elevation, EDITED remains critical to future planning.

“EDITED is a key tool for assortment planning, helping us identify growth and decline across categories, color, and pattern early  and build stronger ranges as we scale in 2026 and beyond.”

Recently launched features, such as the Research Assistant, our intelligent AI agent that delivers from EDITED’s extensive article library, help retailers like Monsoon turn multi-faceted and time-consuming research into immediate action.

“The Research Assistant helps us cut straight to what matters, whether that’s the top womenswear trends from the past 30 days or key shifts in occasionwear. By removing the need for manual analysis, my team can react faster and make smarter, more confident commercial decisions.”

With EDITED’s AI capabilities and market-rich data embedded into future planning, Monsoon’s buying team can plan with greater precision, make proactive commercial decisions, and build ranges that continue to drive sustainable, long-term growth.