• DE

Fashion Procurement Success Study

Consolidating Volume as Leverage for Better Terms

A leading fashion retailer had an unmanageable “shadow HR” landscape carrying significant legal risk. Our restructuring eliminated these risks and released significant liquidity.

Customer

Fashion

2M - 10M Annual Turnover

50 - 100 Employees

The Challenge

As a leading fashion retailer, our client relied heavily on external talent and freelancers to preserve agility. This, however, resulted in a fragmented “shadow HR” landscape: decentralized spend, a complete lack of transparency, and — most critically — substantial legal risk relating to German false self-employment (Scheinselbständigkeit) rules. With hundreds of individual contracts and varying payment terms, the administrative burden was immense and compliance risk was high.

Our Approach

(MSP) structure, built on four pillars:

  1. Spend & Risk Audit: Identified and consolidated spend in the double-digit millions by capturing every individual external freelancer relationship.
  2. MSP Implementation: Selected and onboarded a central MSP acting as sole contracting party, mitigating the legal risk associated with false self-employment regulations.
  3. Commercial Restructuring: Negotiated a shift from individual 15-day payment terms to a standardized 90-day window with the MSP, substantially improving cash flow.
  4. Process Digitalization: Automated the recruit-to-pay workflow, replacing manual negotiations with monthly digital reporting and volume-based discount tiers.

Results

Legal

certainty

Fully eliminated false self-employment risk through centralized compliance and legal safeguards.

€1M+

in working capital

Extended payment terms by 75 days, releasing liquidity in the millions.

3–5%

cost reduction

Achieved through enforced volume-based discounts and reduced administrative effort via process automation.

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