If you’ve looked at your inventory turn, improved your inventory freshness, and taken the markdowns where needed, what’s next? Dan Jablons explains that your next move is to figure out what categories of your business have growth opportunity. Watch and learn from Dan.
Get out of all excess inventory
Let’s say you’ve done some of the things that we’ve talked about in the earlier videos in this series. You’ve looked at your inventory turn. You’ve improved your inventory freshness. You’ve taken the mark downs, everything you need to get out of all the bad (excess) inventory. Here’s what you do next: figure out where can you grow the business.
Find out which categories are selling or not
What categories are underperforming? What categories do you see that you can grow? Where can you get some outside intel—insight into the retail business to figure out how, where, and why things are going to grow?
Make a buying plan and invest in those categories
At this point, you have to start to budget and plan for those things, so you actually plan your purchases to bring in new inventory properly, to get the most profit margin out of those goods.
Unless you have a buying plan that enables you to understand how much to buy, when to land it, and, most importantly, what the ending season inventory should be, unless you have those things in place, you’re never really going to truly improve your turn, improve your margins, and take fewer markdowns.
So, the next step after getting your inventory balance is to figure out where and how you’re going to grow the business, what categories you’re going to grow, and how you are going to buy into and invest in those categories.
