Five Minute Friday: The Real Reason You're Drowning in Inventory

Boutique Chat

Ashley Alderson

Business, Marketing, Retail, Boutiquetips, Fashionindustry, Fashionbusiness, Entrepreneurship, Businessstrategy

5 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Struggling with excess inventory that just won’t move? You’re not alone. In today’s episode, we're diving into one of the most common challenges retailers face: what to do with all that unsold inventory—and, more importantly, how to stop it from happening again.

Here’s the truth: it's not always about running another sale or marking things down (though we'll cover that too). Often, the biggest problem with excess inventory starts long before the markdowns... and it's all about how much attention and strategy you're giving each piece.

In this episode, we cover:

Why excess inventory builds up in the first place (spoiler: it’s not just overbuying)
How to give your products the love they need to actually sell
Creative ways to clear out old inventory fast, including bundle sales, ladder sales, and more
Why early markdowns are better than desperate discounting
How to treat your inventory like cash
The importance of knowing your numbers - inventory age, demand, and seasonality
How your online visibility is directly tied to moving inventory
Why checking your Hub dashboard and scorecard can make all the difference

Key Takeaways:

Don’t just clear excess inventory - learn from it.
Take action on old products quickly: refresh photos, promote, and get eyes on it.
Cash flow matters more than holding onto items that aren’t moving.
Check your Google visibility and analytics to keep traffic flowing to your site or store.

Ready for more help?

Log into your Boutique Hub dashboard to check your analytics, scorecard, and get actionable insights to boost your visibility and traffic.

Not a Member? Join Here: https://tbhub.co/podcastjoin

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Business can be a lonely game, but it doesn't have to be.
0:09.2	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.
0:16.7	We'll hear from product-based businesses of all types, retailers, e-commerce, and wholesale brands,
0:21.7	along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry.
0:25.2	I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub, and I can't wait to chat.
0:36.3	Hey, guys, it's Sarah from the Boutique Hub. I wanted to come on today quick and talk to you about
0:40.3	one of the biggest issues that we see with our retailers. And we get asked these questions quite often
0:45.7	about excess inventory and what should I do with my excess inventory. So here's the first thing. I could
0:51.1	tell you to run a sale. I could tell you to bundle your products together.
0:55.0	I could tell you to, you know, have a flash sale, do a lot of different things like this, you know,
1:00.1	as far as ladder sales, whatnot. But here's the biggest part about this whole have access inventory
1:07.2	situation is you've got to figure out why. Why do you have the excess inventory that you
1:12.8	have? Here's the thing I will tell you that I have found, after speaking to thousands of retailers,
1:17.6	doing a lot of one-on-one coaching with retailers and teaching retail boot camp for eight semesters now,
1:23.2	often we have excess inventory because we do not give the inventory we have the love and attention
1:30.4	that it needs. So I know that might sound kind of fluffy, but the idea here is, this is what I feel
1:36.1	is the main problem. You go to market, you jump on hubbentore, you go to, you know, you go on a
1:41.1	buying spree and you have a ton of inventory delivered at the exact same time
1:45.3	or within a small window. Here's the problem. A lot of times we give about half of that inventory
1:51.5	the attention that it needs, fit videos, we do live sales with it, we, you know, merchandise it properly,
1:56.8	we do fit videos, we do the reels, we put things in our store windows all the things but then there's
2:03.5	those pieces that we don't do that with and a lot of it just comes playing down to the time like we've run out
	...

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