Holding on to old merchandise can kill your profit margins. That’s why it is so important to learn about open-to-buy when running a retail store.
Many retailers have had to deal with an excess of merchandise due to lower demand, it is still your money sitting there and you need to cull it often.
When I was just out of college I had a couple of roommates. We shared buying the groceries, each taking a turn at buying based on need.
One day I poured a glass of fermented milk with clots and mold into a glass. My roommate’s excuse? I couldn’t see it.
Think of your inventory like you would fresh milk. Unless you look at it, you end up with spoiled, stained and unsellable merch.
Selling your inventory is your only way to make money.
Yet I’ve seen as a retail consultant that it is one of the least understood aspects of retail for many.
Your merchandise has to come and go on a regular basis, or it will rot.
Would you want to buy tens of gallons of milk but end up with most of it spoiled?
No; you manage fresh milk by how much you use. The same must be true of your merchandise.
If you buy too much inventory, it will go bad.
When you are buying merchandise, you’re certainly hopeful that it will sell; but your orders have to be based on more than a hunch if you want to grow your business. That’s called an open-to-buy system.
Your stock levels must correspond with your most recent sales trends. For example, you can order 10% more merchandise if sales grew 10% in the previous two months.
Here’s how to figure out your open to buy:
At a very basic level just starting with your full price inventory divided into your total sales can give you a merchandise turn.
How to make an open-to-buy plan:
- Take a physical inventory of all your merchandise at full value. Be sure to count any returns, holds, etc.
- Run a year end report. Divide it by 12 to arrive at how much you sell per month on average.
- Divide your average monthly total sales by your on-hand inventory. Some months will be higher than others so to be accurate, perform a complete store inventory at least twice a year.
An example of a basic open to buy is to take a physical inventory. Let’s say it is $500,000 at retail. Take last year’s total sales of $1,500,000 and divide by twelve to get your average monthly sales of $125,000. When you divide total inventory by average month you get the number four.
That means you have about four months worth of on-hand inventory. That’s bad.
You normally want a merchandise turn of at least two which means in the example above you should have no more than $250,000 at retail on your sales floor at any one time.
When you have so much unsold merchandise it means you have zero open funds to buy merchandise or an open to buy of zero. In that case and any time you are overbought, you should always be looking for more ways to increase merchandise turnover.
Yes, you can move on to a much more robust open-to-buy formula but you’ll need to make some assumptions about how much you’ll be marking down merchandise every month, what you expect to sell through a month, and account for orders already placed.
See also, Why and How To Do A Physical Inventory On A Shoestring Budget
While looking for direction for 2020 during the pandemic, look at the last downturn in 2008 when retail giant Nordstrom decided to shrink its year-end inventory per square foot 12% from the previous year, thereby reducing supplies in line with shrinking demand. That poised them for future growth with new merch rather than stockpiles of unsold goods like Macy’s, a store that was practically trying to give the stuff away with 70-80% off.
Don’t hold on to past failures
If it didn’t sell when it was new, don’t think it suddenly will six months later when your employees are cold to it.
It’s best to identify as quickly as possible what is not performing, move it out, and bring in fresh merchandise. That allows you to get more of the right merch to grow profits.
While that sounds simple, you’ve likely had the experience of telling your manager, “We are going to get rid of X product because it’s not selling,” and had your manager reply, “We can’t get rid of it, we sell tons of it!”
Then you went to your POS reports, and found you only sold a handful. That’s because most employees remember most vividly their last sale, or the last thing a customer requested that you didn’t have.
To get the big picture you need to use your category sales report from your POS system to determine correct inventory levels. Otherwise, you might think it being out of stock is reason enough for a reorder.
But missing stock could be due to demand or theft; customers taking it when no one is looking, or employees lifting it as they take out the trash. You’ll never know unless you look carefully at your category reports.
In Sum
All of your categories should be able to be profitable. Again, shopworn merchandise is like sour milk; people avoid it.
Take aggressive markdowns now while you have shoppers coming in rather than waiting to have a clearance sale when few are entering your doors.
We are pleased to mention that the author Bob Phibbs aka the Retail Doctor (who has contributed to BRA with outstanding articles like this one and so many others that we have reposted over the past couple of years) has also contributed to BRA monetarily. We value his relevant retail insight and encourage you to learn more about his offerings by clicking on the following link to his website: www.retaildoc.com
– Doug Works, Executive Director BRA
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