GOAL SETTING SERIES: Evaluating Your Bridal Store’s Inventory

You’ve got all these dresses, now what?

Its coming to the end of the year.. end of the quarter.. end of the month, so its the perfect time to make sure your sales and your books are in a good place.

It’s easy to forget forget that the inventory you have in your store is an asset until you sell it off the floor. In other words, it is NOT to your advantage to keep a bunch of dresses hanging on your racks without making money.

This could mean it might be a good time to host a blowout or flash sale!

As a Poppy user, there are two reports that can help you the most in determining what should stay and what should go.

If you aren’t a Poppy user still follow along as we can help you understand what information you need to be looking for in your own system.

Poppy’s Non-Performing Report

The non-performing report in Poppy is going to help you create a list of items you know are not selling in your store. The great thing about this report is you can set the parameters.

Do you want to see what hasn’t sold in the last 2 months or what hasn’t sold in the last 6 months? Every store may have a little bit of a different way of looking at what’s not performing and this gives you flexibility to change the timeframe and department.

Example Time:

Say that you pull a report to get a list of what in your store has not sold in 6 months or more. It’s time to be pretty aggressive with these items. Maybe you do an end of year blow out sale where the items that haven’t sold in 6 months or more are priced at $399, If it hasn’t sold in 5 months it’s $499, 3 months it’s $599. 

Curated Styles Report

If you are a Poppy user, we hope you are utilizing curated styles. This information with the use of tagging your items will allow you to run reports to see the conversion rate on specific items.

Not a Poppy User:

How to Evaluate Curated Styles and Conversions

If you do not currently have something like Poppy’ s curated styles feature, we recommend you start by creating your own spreadsheets. Use basic information and track how many times an item is tried on versus how many times it is purchased. Then you wil be able to see the conversion rate on individual items in your store!

Example Time:

You may have had an item sell pretty recently, but when you look at the conversion rate you realize it might be time to let her go. You could have had this item in your store for a year, but she sold last month. A sale is great, but when you see the conversion of that item, realizing she’s been tried on 50 times and only sold once, not so great.

This will be a game changer making sure you are moving your non-performers, not just by last sold or the amount of times sold, but by conversion rates on individual items.

Poppy’s Item Trend Report

To take things a step further and get ahead of the curve. In Poppy, you can use the item trend report to see an individual item’s sales history. Maybe it was a hot seller 6 months ago, but it has been recently trending downward in sales. Seeing this trend will allow you to start planning when the best time to offload it is at a slight discount before it becomes a item that starts collecting dust in your store.

You now have 3 solid pieces of information to help create a data driven end of month/quarter/year blow out sale extravaganza…say that three times fast!