I attended Kornit Konnections this week and spent most of my time listening to retailers describe their own problems, mostly disconnected systems and planning calendars that had quietly become constraints rather than tools. But the elephant in the room was the problem that retail has been trying to solve for 20+ years: inventory.

On the balance sheet, finished goods inventory looks like an asset. In 2023, the fashion industry produced somewhere between 2.5 and 5 billion unsold garments, representing an estimated $70 to $140 billion in retail value sitting in warehouses, on markdown racks, or written off entirely. Nike reported in 2024 that markdowns affected 44 percent of its assortment, more than double the figure from two years prior.

The root cause is structural: most retail planning still operates on a 12 to 18 month calendar, with buyers committing to finished goods nearly a year before a consumer ever sees them. Retail has been talking about fixing this problem for two decades and largely has not, because of the complex change management problem embedded in how retail companies are built, capitalized, and led.

What POD has gotten right by necessity

Print-on-demand businesses were not built around a planning calendar because they could not afford to be. The entire POD model was constructed around a single structural insight: produce only what is ordered, when it is ordered, and hold raw material in its most configurable state until the last responsible moment. This is what retail needs to borrow: not just the philosophy, but the operating model behind it.

What POD has not figured out yet

The flexibility that makes print-on-demand structurally superior is also the thing that keeps most POD businesses from becoming "real" brands. When you never fully commit to a product, you never fully commit to a point of view, which is what brands are built on.

The global retail technology solutions market reached $234.5 billion in 2023, with more than 18,000 venture capital investors active in the space. Against that backdrop, the entire print-on-demand software market is estimated at $4.5 billion in total market size in 2025. That capital gap traces directly to how differently capital has flowed into these two industries.

The shift that changes everything

The transition from operator-driven decisions to systems-driven flows is the defining operational shift of this decade, arriving in both industries simultaneously, though from very different starting points. POD is approaching the transition from the opposite direction: less infrastructure, less institutional data, less financial backing, but a model already structurally aligned with on-demand, unit-level economics.

The most important variable is still the people

The POD and retail industries are missing deliberate cross-pollination of talent. The POD industry needs more operators who have run sophisticated retail planning functions and supply chains. Retail needs people who have built nimble, inventory-light operations from the ground up. Right now, those two talent pools barely intersect—one of the most consequential and least discussed gaps in either industry.