It’s a retailer’s rule of thumb that across the typical product lifecycle, roughly 1/3rd of inventory sells at full-price, 1/3rd sells at a discount, and 1/3rd goes unsold. By employing more specialized tactics made possible by inexpensive and quick-to-market DTC promotions, merchants can increase the percentage of products sold earlier in the product lifecycle. Specialty stores and private sales serve micro-segments of the market with bespoke service levels, marketing, and prices without disrupting the primary ecommerce sales channel. ESW deploys a suite of these stores that help brands sell at higher margins, decreasing the amount of inventory left unsold and written off.
Input your catalog information into the calculator below to see how you could improve your margins by adopting ESW’s suite of product lifecycle management tools.
By selling more units at full-price and break-even, fewer units remain to liquidate, maximizing the average margin for the collection as a whole. This is usually around 3x the average margin for a collection without any change to their strategy.
Even by only offering one more event anywhere in a collection’s lifecycle, less inventory remains to liquidate at a loss. Keeping these events out of the general market also protects the brand and other distribution channels from further dilution.
This is what you’re probably seeing today with that same promotional cadence that everyone else is using.