In 2026, a trade announcement can rewrite a footwear or apparel brand’s cost model overnight. The brands weathering it are not the ones with the cleverest hedges - they are the ones who can see their true landed cost and re-decide fast. That is a data capability before it is a procurement one.

One of the defining forces on fashion, sportswear and footwear in 2026 is trade volatility. New tariffs and shifting trade policy have moved cost models sharply and repeatedly. McKinsey has estimated tariff-driven sourcing-cost increases in the mid-thirties of percent for apparel and leather goods, and the sourcing map has redrawn itself within a year - one major economy’s share of US apparel imports fell from roughly a fifth to under a tenth in about twelve months as brands scrambled to diversify. Freight has turned volatile again on top of it.

For a global, multi-brand business sourcing from around the world, this is not a passing storm. It is the weather now - and it rewards a capability most brands have not built.

The problem is not the tariff. It is how slowly you can respond

You cannot control trade policy. What separates brands is the speed and confidence of their response. When a tariff shifts, a sourcing location that was competitive yesterday can be uncompetitive today. The brands that come through it well reallocate orders, revise schedules, manage inventory and re-price deliberately - within days. The ones that struggle spend weeks assembling spreadsheets while the margin bleeds.

The consistent finding from the recent disruptions is blunt: the companies that adjusted best were the ones with stronger execution discipline, more diversified networks, and - underneath both - better supplier data. Resilience was not luck. It was designed in.

Most brands cannot see their own landed cost

Here is the uncomfortable starting point. Ask many brands for the true, all-in landed cost of a given product from a given supplier - duty, freight, currency, the lot - and no one can produce it quickly. Sourcing often runs through intermediaries; cost sits in fragmented systems and spreadsheets; tariff exposure is opaque, with brands unclear how much duty they are actually absorbing.

When a tariff rewrites your cost model overnight, you cannot re-decide what you cannot see.

This is the crux. Every clever response to a tariff - re-source, re-price, reallocate - depends on knowing your current position accurately and instantly. If assembling that view takes a fortnight, your response is a fortnight late, every time.

Intelligent diversification needs data, not just more suppliers

The strategy almost everyone is pursuing - diversify beyond one country, add nearshoring, spread across multiple regions - only works with data behind it. Adding suppliers without the ability to qualify, compare and allocate across them creates complexity, not resilience.

The goal is not maximum diversification; it is intelligent diversification - a supplier network deliberately balanced across cost, responsiveness, compliance and risk. And that balancing act is a data exercise: consistent supplier data across brands and regions, landed cost modelled by scenario, risk and compliance signals, and clear allocation logic. Without that, a bigger supplier base is just a bigger thing to manage badly.

This is where AI earns its place

Once the data foundation exists, sourcing agility becomes a strong use case for the kind of agents this series has described. An agent can continuously model landed cost across sourcing scenarios and policy changes, flag exposure before it reaches the margin, simulate a re-source or a price change and show the effect, and surface the decision to a person with the options already assembled.

Note what that is and is not. It is not handing sourcing strategy to a machine - the judgement, the relationships and the trade-offs stay firmly human. It is compressing the time between a policy shift and a confident decision from weeks to days. In a market where the ground moves monthly, that speed is the advantage.

The foundation you already part-own

The reassuring part is that much of the raw material already exists inside your business. Supplier records, purchase costs and product data sit in your ERP and finance systems; what is missing is usually consistency across brands and regions, the external trade and freight signals layered alongside, and the modelling and monitoring built on top.

For a multi-brand house on SAP and a cloud data platform, this is a data-integration and decision-intelligence exercise, not a new procurement system to rip in. The value is in joining up and activating what you already hold.

What to do now

The starting moves are concrete:

• Get to a single, trusted view of true landed cost by product and supplier - all in.

• Map your exposure: where would one policy change or one disrupted lane hurt most? Concentration is the hidden risk.

• Build scenario modelling, so you can test a re-source or a re-price in hours, not weeks.

• Add monitoring that flags exposure early, before it lands on the margin.

• Treat supplier and cost data as a managed, living asset - and start with your most exposed categories and lanes.

The bottom line

Trade volatility is not going away, and no brand can out-hedge it forever. The durable advantage is the speed and confidence to re-decide when the ground shifts - and that runs on data, not luck. If you would like to see how quickly your brands could re-price or re-source when the next tariff lands, and whether your data would let you, that is a conversation we would welcome. Get in touch now.