7 Mar 2025 · 0 min
Ashley Alderson and Sarah from the Boutique Hub explain why retailers end up with excess inventory and how to fix it. Most excess stock comes from poor timing or lack of marketing. Use POS aging reports to find what's sitting, reshoot and promote items that weren't showcased, and take decisive markdowns instead of small incremental cuts.
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Business can be a lonely game. But it doesn't have to be. Welcome to Boutique Chat where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek. We'll hear from product based businesses of all types, retailers, e commerce and wholesale brands, along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry. I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat.
Hey guys, it's Sarah from the Boutique Hub. I wanted to come on today quick and talk to you about one of the biggest issues that we see with our retailers. And we get asked these questions quite often about excess inventory and what should I do with my excess inventory? So here's the first thing I could tell you to run a sale. I could tell you to bundle your products together. I could tell you to, you know, have a flash sale, do a lot of different things like this, you know, as far as ladder, sales, whatnot. But here's the biggest part about this whole have excess inventory situation is you've got to figure out why, why do you have the excess inventory that you have? Here's the thing I will tell you that I have found after speaking to thousands of retailers, doing a lot of one on one coaching with retailers and teaching retail bootcamp for eight semesters. Now, often we have excess inventory because we do not give the inventory, we have the love and attention that it needs. So I know that might sound kind of fluffy, but the idea here is this is what I, I feel is the main problem. You go to market, you jump on Hub and tour, you go to, you know, you go on a buying spree and you have a ton of inventory delivered at the exact same time or within a small window. Here's the problem. A lot of times we give about half of that inventory, the attention that it needs fit videos, we do live sales with it, we, you know, merchandise it properly. We do fit videos, we do the reels, we put things in our store windows, all the things. But then there's those pieces that we don't do that with. And a lot of it just comes plain down to the time. Like we've run out of time to do that, right? We didn't, we didn't stagger things in. We said we were going to get to it, we just did not get to it. So, so here's my thing, number one, learn from the inventory that's still sitting here. If it is strictly a situation that you did not showcase it, now's the time, take action. Quickly reshoot it, re merchandise it, you wear it. Make sure you're running ads to it. Make sure it's on the hero image of your website. If you still have a decent amount of stock in it, run ads to it. Don't run ads to something you only have one or two left in, so get eyeballs on it. Give it a chance to survive in your store. But however, if it has reached its peak, if the demand is gone for this product, people don't care the population it's, or popularity of the product. It's over. Then, then it's time to really make a move. As far as markdowns. So I do a lot of videos about markdowns and I, I feel like taking the markdown early is better than late. But in this situation, I'm assuming you've, you've missed that window of opportunity. So now take the markdown quickly. Do not get emotionally attached to your inventory. It does not get better with age. So identify the age of the inventory. Use your point of sale system and identify your aging reports. Make sure you know how much inventory you have on hand. Are you sitting on way too much inventory to reach the sales goals that you have? Or do you not have enough inventory to reach the sales that you have? Maybe you have too much of the wrong inventory, right? Maybe you are sitting on an excessive amount of winter sweaters that make it look like your overall inventory numbers are high. But you guys, you can't sell winter sweaters in the summer months. So knowing the age of your inventory and what type of inventory it is, what inventory class it is, is super important. Understand the popularity of the, the demand for the product. That's very important. So take the markdowns early, take a big discount, take that bigger hit early, rather than murdering the price tag with a bunch of 10, 15, 20, 25% off. People don't care, right? It makes it very messy. Looks desperate. So actually. So a couple things you can do. Bundle sales. If you want to move a lot of product together, bundle products together and sell them as one. Do ladder sales, right? You know, start off like two items, 20 off, 334, 40. Sell multiple items together. That can really help move out old inventory as well. But the bottom line is you have got to free up your cash. That is your cash sitting on your racks. If you start looking at every one of these shirts as a 20 bill versus just orange shirt, man, you want to start taking action fast. It makes you feel like, that's my money, I want it back. So another video that I do here inside the Hub is about turn rate, knowing how much inventory you actually need to have on hand and how often it turns in your store to make your sales goals. So sometimes I talk about going grocery shopping and in retail boot camp I give this example. Think about when you go grocery shopping, you only want to get as much inventory or groceries for the certain amount of time that you're going to eat, right? Because if you have too much product there, it's going to expire, it's going to get yucky, you're not going to eat it, it's going to go to waste and you're going to throw it out and then you're going to be sad because that's your cash. This unsold inventory is the same, so treat it that way. So know the age of your inventory, know the demand for your inventory, know the season in which it's popular and when it sells. Look at that and look at that as an expiration date and work your way backwards and help you build out that inventory markdown strategy early. So if you do those things going forward, I hope hope that you do not have excess inventory on hand. Now here is my last tip. Get as a hub member, get into your dashboard, do your analytics, do your your scorecard. Understand where your business is at as far as being attractive to Google and to its rankings and to sending people to your store onto your website. And if Google does not recognize you and does not know you exist here, it doesn't matter what you do with your inventory, nobody's going to find you. So we've built some really cool scorecard metrics inside your boat cup dashboard to run the data to find out just how relevant you are in the big world of retail in that space. So are people finding you? How long are they on your site? Where are they coming from? All of those kind of things will help you be the better marketer to turn that inventory. Whether it's older or newer, that doesn't matter. But odds are. Or the, the whole general idea here is we gotta get eyeballs on your site to move that inventory. So if you have excess inventory, make sure you're learning from it, right? It doesn't just happen. Don't just go out and think you have to buy more inventory. Before you do that, learn from your past mistakes and then please jump in there, find out if Google even knows you exist. And this goes for brick and mortar stores as well as online where we need to make sure traffic is coming in your doors, whether it's a website door or your brick and mortar space. So for more information please you guys let me know what else I can help with. Jump into the groups. We are excited to see you, ask for more videos and always we're here to help. Thanks guys.
That's it for five minute Friday you guys. I hope you found some quick actionable steps you can put into play in your business right away. As always, if you're not yet a member of the Boutique Hub, I would love to personally invite you to join us. It's you where where all of the daily conversations happen. The up to date what is working now in the industry conversations, the latest trainings, trend reports, discounts, resources and of course access to thousands of wholesale brands that you also know and love. So please take a minute, follow the link in the show notes and we would love to invite you to join us inside of the Boutique Hub.
