Shownotes
If you ever feel overwhelmed by stock decisions, unsure how much to order, or frustrated by cash tied up in products that aren’t selling… this episode is definitely for you.
In this super practical conversation, Vicki chats with merchandising expert Anna Youngson, founder of Majury Merchandising. Anna works with independent brands to help them truly understand what their stock and sales data are telling them – so they can buy better, sell more, and keep more cash in the business.
You’ll come away from this episode with:
- Clear ideas for how to better forecast your sales and plan your stock accordingly
- A fresh take on pricing strategies (including why it's OK to price differently in different markets!)
- Smart ways to shift slow-moving stock – without slashing prices or harming your brand
- What key numbers to track and how they can help you make better buying decisions
Whether you’re new to selling products or scaling up your range, this episode is packed with actionable advice that will help you feel more confident and in control of your stock.
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Transcripts
Welcome to the Bring Your Product Idea to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.
I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started.
Hello and welcome to this episode of Bring Your Product Idea to Life. Wherever you are listening or watching this episode.
Just a reminder, you can watch all of my episodes on YouTube by going to YouTube and looking for Vicki Weinberg. All of the episodes there, we've got lots of short clips. It's brilliant. So come along to YouTube, subscribe, get all of the episodes.
It is a great place to be. So on today's episode, I am speaking to Anna Youngson.
Anna helps independent retailers understand what their sales and stock data is telling them to increase revenue and profit. There's so much data available to small businesses and a lot of the time brands don't know what to do with it.
So Anna helps them digest the stories and numbers are telling them to buy less and sell more. So Anna is a merchandiser and I've invited her on TODAY to talk specifically about stock.
But Anna tells me that stock is a huge cost to all small businesses and stock, as you will likely know, can cause some issues. Whether that's having too much stock, being out of stock, having a lot of your money tied up in stock. So Anna today talks through all of these.
She has lots of really practical suggestions and solutions to common issues you might be experiencing with your stock management and also some really proactive things you can do to manage it. Well, I would love now to Shoe shooter Anna. So hi Anna, thank you so much for being here.
Anna Youngson:Thank you for having me.
Vicki Weinburg:You're so welcome. Can you start by please give an introduction to yourself, your business and what you do.
Anna Youngson:Of course. So I'm Anna. I'm the founder of Majuri Merchandising. I set up the business just coming up to a year year ago.
Prior to that I was working in in house in the corporate world and worked for big brand Topshop, Accessorize, Warehouse, and most recently I was head of department at Children's Salon which is a luxury online branded retailer.
So I've worked in an array of different product types, different businesses, different sales channels, women's wear, kids across retail, digital marketplace, so wholesale.
So I've worked across a lot but I set up the business, yeah, like I said a year ago, to really help independent brands, fashion brands mainly that one don't really know what merchandising is, let alone knowing that they need that support in the business. And there's so much creativity out there with smaller brands and they are the ones that really need the help.
So I kind of have gone back to what I really love most and working directly with product, you know, supporting businesses that really need the help and getting that creativity out there more because it's such a lovely choice for, you know, for customers now rather than, you know, just buying high Street.
Vicki Weinburg:That's brilliant. Thank you so much.
And obviously we spoke a little bit sort of before we recorded about what we were going to cover today because there's so much that merchandise entails.
But hopefully what we've landed on will be really useful for people in terms of talking about costs and stock and some of the common issues, I guess, faced by small businesses. So, as we all know, costs are rising at the moment in lots and lots of areas.
So let's start by talking about the impact this can have on small businesses and then we'll talk about some of the things that they can do in response.
Anna Youngson: Brexit deal, which was what,:Has always been a challenging sector to work in. That hasn't changed, but the uncertainty has got more and extreme.
So it's the strategies that brands would have done, you know, years ago still count and it's still really important to do them, but it's just even more important to have those strategies in place to secure their businesses. You know, it's the, the costs that are rising are fixed costs. You know, businesses can't do anything about them.
And I think that's what's the most frustrating thing you've got, you know, national insurance, wages going up as well as, like business rates. So the one thing you can control is your stock costs.
You know, how much you are investing in your stock to ultimately sell that's going to drive your revenue.
So understanding what's selling and why is so important to that helps drive your stock strategies to help your cash flow that you don't have unnecessary cash tied up in stock that doesn't need to be, doesn't need to be sitting on the shelves effectively not doing anything and then doesn't allow you to then invest in more stock of the things that are selling. So those fixed costs aren't, you know, Aren't changing. You can change your, you can, you know, change your, or influence your stock holding.
But the other thing that is really key to support these margin squeezes is your pricing strategy. And how you price your stock is so important.
And one of the key things of merchandising and the biggest piece of advice I always say to clients is to make sure that you're pricing your stock or your, your product based on how much it's worth rather than just a margin target. Because you can fall into some slippery slopes with, you know, with that of just like a tick box exercise.
But actually you, you know, you can increase your, your margins based on what you think your customer, you know, the value of that product and what your customer is willing to pay for it.
Vicki Weinburg:Thank you. And I really love that advice.
That's something I talk about a lot as well, is not just pricing by applying a formula, which I think was something that people may be told to do. A long, a long time ago there was that advice, wasn't there? Ads have whatever percentage to your cost and there's just a price.
But you've probably seen the same, I've seen lots of small businesses where I think their products are actually quite underpriced because maybe they've taken this method and then you look at other similar products in the market and you think you could be charging 5, 10 pounds, whatever more and making so much more money for the same product.
Anna Youngson:Yeah, totally agree.
And the other thing that a lot of brands don't, don't know or maybe haven't thought of is if they were, if they sell outside of the uk, that it's okay to have different pricing strategies depending on where you're selling. So it, you might have a, a pricing architecture that works really well in the UK that covers all your costs and you're making profit.
And that's all good. But translated into the eu, obviously there's a lot of extra costs now which need to be taken into consideration.
The us, you know, we've now got the tariffs to consider, but if you think that product is worth more in those markets, it's important to reflect that. So you might have, you know, a 2 markup in the UK, but you might end up having a 4 markup in the US.
But actually customers in the US are still willing to pay that, so it doesn't matter.
So it is important to kind of look at it in your kind of key pockets of where your business is driven from and that can really help protect your margins as well.
Vicki Weinburg:That's really Good advice. Thank you.
Because I think a lot of the time businesses might convert, you know, convert the cost into the local currencies, into euros or whatever, and just do a straight conversion.
Didn't actually think about the fact that you can, you don't have to do that and you can maybe be looking at those markets and seeing what the cost is over there. Because you're right, I suppose, that there will be some products that will be more expensive in Europe than they would in the uk, for example.
Anna Youngson:Yeah, so, exactly.
So if you did your direct conversion, you might sell something for £100 in the UK, but when you directly convert it in the EU, it might end up being £120. But if you're selling it there, if you're selling it for that price and customers are buying it, it doesn't matter.
No one's ever going to necessarily complain that they're not the same. You might get a few odd customers that notice, but it's quite unusual to get that feedback.
Vicki Weinburg:Well, that's really useful. Thank you so much. Let's come back to stock as well. Anna.
So you mentioned that adjusting your stock strategy is one of the key things a small business can do to help with costs. So what are some of the proactive things that a small business can do?
Anna Youngson:The best thing or two, two or three things that are really key to your stock strategy is one, to have a sales forecast coupled ideally with a marketing calendar so you can see your peaks and troughs of your sales, you know, throughout the year. Because most businesses will have peaks and troughs. Christmas is a good example.
If you're a high summer business, you've got probably some peak sales through May, June, July. If you don't know what those peaks and troughs are, you don't know how much stock you should be holding.
It's not going to be a flat number throughout the course of the year. So that is a good, a really good tool for brands to use to help drive what, what and when they should be buying.
Stock strategies that kind of helping the here and now analyze your data. You know, what is selling and what isn't selling. I see lots of brands, say, have a lot of money tied up in what I call dead stock that isn't selling.
And you, I hear a lot. Oh, but I'm, you know, I'm sure things will improve. I'm just going to wait till next month and see how things are.
And actually willing your sales to improve isn't a strategy. And it's not, not normally what people want to hear, but you have to deal with that stock.
It's not going to suddenly if you haven't sold anything for six, eight weeks, it's most likely not to then sell anything for the next six, eight weeks. And the longer you leave it, the less the, the more money you have tied up and the more challenges you have with your cash flow.
So dealing with the here and now of what's not working is really important and having a strategy around that. The other thing kind of going back to the sales forecast is planning ahead, understanding how long your lead time is for.
Whether you're, if you produce your own stock or you buy your buy in branded stock. Understanding how long it takes from placing an order through to it going onto your website or into your store.
That time frame needs to be like ingrained, you know, post it notes all over your office. It needs to be ingrained in you because that is how long it takes you to react to them, up to sales, to the market trends.
So if something is really working, you have to make sure if you can afford, you can react and buy more to increase your order with them, with the supplier. You need to know how long it's going to take you to do that. To then work backwards and say, well it's going to.
If it takes me eight weeks to get this stock in and I know that I might need some for high summer. Eight weeks before high summer. Right. Okay. That's my, you know, my marker in my diary to make sure that I've looked at it in time for peak trade.
Because at any one time you want to be holding your, the, the amount of stock you want to be holding is really your lead time. That amount of sales within that time period plus, plus a little bit of a buffer. And that means that you're never holding ever like excess stock.
Basically you're only ever holding as much as your sales require and your lead time permits.
Vicki Weinburg:Thank you. I'm just thinking that is really tricky, isn't it?
Getting the balance between having enough stock to meet demand and then not having so much stock that you're tying up lots of capital in, in stock, particularly if it isn't moving. How can you get that balance right?
Anna Youngson:That's a very good question.
Vicki Weinburg:I know it's probably not a simple answer, right.
Anna Youngson:There are lots of things that you can do and there's never, there's no go to answer.
But if you have the right plans in place and you know how you have got your sales forecast and that might be building blocks of visitors to your Website conversion rates. You know that if you have X amount of visitors at this conversion rate, it means that I'm going to sell ideally X amount a week.
If during the course of the months you see those sales per week not coming through as your forecast, you know those metrics that you have used to get to that ideal sales number. So let's just take that as an example. Your visitors and your conversion, you know what those numbers are. So you then have a look, right?
What are my visitors compared to what I thought they would be and what is my conversion? And if either of one of those metrics will not be performing as you had hoped and that then triggers you to delve more into why.
So if you haven't got as many visitors as you anticipated, why is that? Are your ads not working? Do you need to re review your marketing strategy?
Had you anticipated a press piece that went live in within that month and it never happened and it's been delayed till next month, there'll always be that, you know, there'll be a reason why and triggers you to think, I know what I need to do to fix it.
And then on the other side, if your conversion's lower than you anticipated, but your visitors are on track, you know, it's also thinking, why am I, why is my conversion down? What is. Yeah, what's impacting that? And that could be a multitude of things from customers not finding things on your website.
Is it a price restriction where they actually get to check and they go, oh, actually do you know what, that's a bit expensive, I find it somewhere else. Are they buying that same product in a different colour way and actually it's a color failure or you know, of that particular product.
It could be the imagery online isn't showing that product often showing it off enough and you might want to relook at kind of reshooting it.
So having, going back to planning, having those plans in place and those building blocks of how you get to those numbers then drives your trading strategies. When you have, when sales don't come through as you anticipate, there's lots of other things that you can do.
I mean that was, that's just I suppose, one example. But planning is key.
Vicki Weinburg:That's really helpful, thank you.
I'm also going to come back if it's okay to something you mentioned a few moments ago because it stuck with me and I don't want anyone thinking, oh, but what would you do?
So you mentioned earlier, if you had a product or products and they hadn't been selling for six to eight weeks they were sitting there, they weren't selling. And you mentioned if that's the case they're probably not likely to suddenly start selling. So what would you do in that case?
What would you suggest a business does if they're in that situation where they've got something sat there and it's just not moving.
Anna Youngson:So a lot of brands have a real resistance to markdown, to putting things into sale and there is a right and wrong place, you know, right time and a not right time to do that. And it's not always the answer, but it is sometimes the only answer to release that cash.
If you are considering doing a sale or a promotion, there are ways of doing it that don't, aren't seen as maybe distressing, you know, or brand damaging. You don't have to apply red writing all over your website or your shop front to say in sale now, you know, come in bargain prices.
There are some really clever ways that you can, you can drive sales without doing that. So just doing a really short promotion that ties into an on brand marketing event can be really good.
So there's lots of awareness weeks within the calendar.
There might be something that ties in to your brand values that is in a few weeks time that you think oh actually that might be quite nice that you could do a gift with purchase, you could do like of the products that weren't selling that buy, you know, buy three, get three for the price of two type offers. So that's kind of a few things that aren't as distressing. Or you could do a short sharp promotion over the course of four days.
Always try and do it over a time when people, when people have money.
So doing it at the mid month in the middle of January for example isn't necessarily an ideal time to be offering, you know, doing promotions but actually over the course of pay weekend and it ties into, you know, you know that you have good traffic on, on your website for example at that time as well. It's a good combination.
You don't always have to discount but there are, I'd encourage people to have a look if you're a digital business about how your where your product, the product's not selling where it is on your website.
So if you've got two or three pages of dresses it might be that dresses that aren't selling are all sitting on page three and customers aren't clicking through, they're you know, scrolling down page one and then leaving the website and going to look at tops instead of that it's repinning those ones that are on page three, maybe onto page one and testing to see if that makes a difference to your sales. It could be photography, it could be the fact that you've just got too much choice.
It could be that you've offering a very similar thing, a very similar product elsewhere and it's what's called a. Well, what I would call a me too.
It's two products in your range that ultimately are doing the same thing and you're splitting your, your sales by having both in the range. So in that situation identifying that that is the case is really key.
So you don't do it again next time of when you're doing building your range that you have that take that into consideration. But it also then thinks okay, well that the pink version of this is selling much better than the blue version of this.
I don't mind discounting it because actually I know I've still it's not going to impact my sales because I've still got it in the range in another color. So there are a few things that, that you can think about doing but hoping that sales improve tends not to work.
You do need to take action to, to make that happen and test it. You know, try different things if you're really resistant to marking things down or reducing the price.
You know, try repositioning it on your website. Try doing some bundles and bundling it with products that are really selling so you know that, that traction is there that. Yeah. So.
And it's not a one size fits all but there are ways for improving your, your cash flow for sure.
Vicki Weinburg:That's brilliant. Thank you so much. But these are all just as you say, it's not one size fits all. There's not one answer.
But these are just some great ideas for anyone who's stuck and thinking what do I do? You've given so many possible suggestions that that's really useful. Thank you so much.
And the other thing that made me think about is I quite often go to websites and you know, you'll see I don't that say some shoes and they're all the same price apart from there's one pair that's cheaper, there's one pair that's marked down so now I'll know that's the one that's maybe selling less or maybe they've got more stock off.
Anna Youngson:The other thing as well.
Actually to mention that can be a reason why you end up having cash tied up in stock that's not selling is if you haven't bought the Right size ratio of something.
So if you're a size to a product based business that offers sized product, traditionally when you buy product you should always buy the sizes in a curve so that you're buying more of those middle sizes and slightly less of the fringe sizes. I see a lot of people buying flat size ratios.
From smallest to largest, you sell out of your core sizes and then you end up getting left with your smaller sizes and your larger sizes which is called your fringe sizes. And because you bought too much of them, it's going to take you longer to sell them.
So you're looking at your reports thinking gosh, why isn't this selling? It was selling really well to start with and now it stopped. Because it's still really good to set to mark down probably.
Or my advice would be to mark down or reduce the price of those fringe sizes because you have just bought too much. It's not a reflection of the fact that that stock didn't sell well initially. You've just not bought it in the right size ratio.
So unless you can afford to have those fringe sizes in your range until you sell out of them, which most businesses will want to free up that cash. And also it's prime.
If you think about it as like prime real estate on your website you've got another option on your that's got fringe sizes that aren't selling that actually if it wasn't there you could have something else that was newer, more exciting, you know. And customers are unfortunately really driven by newness.
Vicki Weinburg:That's really helpful, thank you. It feels like there's a lot in looking at data and looking and knowing your numbers that's really like a theme. I'm getting what we're talking about.
Are there, is there anything that.
I don't know whether that's patterns or specific data points that small businesses sometimes overlook but if they were looking at would maybe help them whether that's with forecasting or managing their stock. Do you know what I mean? Because there was. There's so many numbers we could be looking at as a small business.
Anything you think is overlooked but actually is quite important.
Anna Youngson:There's a few calculations that are really key when like within merchandising that helps you understand how well something is selling and how long it's going to be in the business for. And you can obviously there's the obvious sales analysis where you're looking at your top line sales versus a like for like period versus last year.
That is still your go to as your number one to understand how your business is doing.
But if you're looking at product analysis and on a line level to understand which products are selling and which ones aren't, you've got weeks cover which is looking at your current stock divided by your last week's sales and that tells you how long that stock is going to be. How long are you, you're going to be in stock if you can can continue to sell it at the rate you sold it last week.
So if you have 100 units in stock and you sold 10 last week, that's 10 weeks cover you would have and then in 10 weeks time you would have zero. You might then know that your lead time is 15 weeks to get that product back. So you think well that's a red flag.
I'm going to be out of stock then for five weeks until I can get some more.
You would then look to see whether or not by repeating it or bringing in a new version is still relevant for in 15 weeks time because you might have missed it might be outside of the selling window. Then you know of that key of that product. So weeks cover is really key.
And the other two that kind of go hand in hand is rate of sale and sell through. So your rate of sale is, is how many units you sell on average a week whilst it's in stock. So it's your.
If something's in stock for 10 weeks and you sell two a week, that's a 5 rate of sale. So it's your number of weeks divided by how many you're selling a week. So that allows you to forecast going forward.
So if I know I'm going to be selling, I can't remember the example I gave now two a week, five a week, you can then say, you can then forecast, right? If that's my trajectory of that product, I know I can predict that I might be out of stock of that in X amount of weeks time.
Is that again that triggers, is that within my lead time of getting more? Is that going to, am I going to end up with a load by the time I go to say, you know, go into sale period? So that's key rate of sale.
And then you've got sell through. Sell through is really a good metric to look at if you're a wholesale when you're buying branded into your business.
It's still good to look at if you produce your own products. But sell through is also really dependent on how much you buy and how much you invest in your stock.
If you buy 1,000 units of something and you only sell 100 a week, 100 a week for your business is still, might be still really good, but your sell through might look bad because you've just bought too much. And actually, in hindsight, you should have only bought 500 because you want to be in and out of it within five weeks.
So your sell through is the amount you have sold divided by the amount you've bought as a percentage. So sell through is one.
You have to make sure that you are quite critical of your of or look into your, how much you've bought originally because it doesn't suggest necessarily always that something's a bad seller.
If you've bought too much, it could, you know, you could be selling, like I said, you could be selling a good amount per week, but you've just got excess stock at the end. Does that make sense?
Vicki Weinburg:It does make sense. There's a lot to think about, isn't there?
Anna Youngson:There is a lot. And, you know, with independent, you know, when you're a founder of a, of a business, there is so much to think about.
And having set up my business a year ago, I feel it too. You know, you have to wear all the hats, do all the dues, do all the things.
And it is, it is too much to, for everyone to, to be able to do everything that they need to do to be, you know, for their brand to succeed.
And that's why I think in, you know, investing in support, in expertise, you know, for example, us working together with one of my clients, like I tried doing what you do and setting products up on Amazon, and there's a reason there you exist because it's really difficult and you have to have the knowledge and the expert expertise to know how to do it properly and for brands to succeed and do it well.
And I think, you know, the best piece of advice for brands that are really trying to scale is thinking about your expertise in your business, how you can draw on existing expertise, but actually, what expertise are you missing and who do you know that can support you? Because it's, it's gold dust, isn't it? Finding that the best formula of, you know, the right knowledge together to, to push brands forward.
Vicki Weinburg:Definitely. And I can totally relate because I work with brands and obviously I know what I'm doing on Amazon. I'm really good at that.
But then, you know, I will speak to brands and they'll say, oh, how many, how many units should I send in? How often should I restock stock?
And initially I can make some, you know, some, some conservative estimates, but that gets really hard because I, that's not my area of expertise and this is somewhere. Well, I, I always say, well actually you need to speak to someone who knows how, how to work that out because it is really hard.
I think managing your stock wherever you sell is really, really tricky because it's so easy to, it's been really blunt. It's always just get it wrong, isn't it?
Anna Youngson:Yeah. And it's easy to get it wrong, but it's so easy to get it right.
And I think when you've been doing it yourself as a founder for so long, it gets you so far and hats off to anyone that does it, you know, does it all for a long period of, you know, time within their business. But to, to then get you to the next level and I always say you can know what's got you here isn't going to get you there where you want to be.
Because founding your business and getting to where you are now requires a very different mindset, strategy, trading tools to getting from like here to here. And you do. It does require more of a in depth level, I think of knowledge to look at the right things and ask the right questions.
And I think that's also hard for brands where they just sometimes want someone to talk to, to sound out their thought process of like I had thought this, is that right? Or I did this before, is that something that you would recommend? And that's.
Sometimes all people need is that reassurance of how they're doing it at the moment works for them and that's amazing, Carry on and do it and they get that reassurance. And then other brands, you have those conversations and they go, oh, do you know what? Actually I can't do it on my own. I'd really love your help.
So, you know, it really does depend on where you are in your business.
Vicki Weinburg:I'm absolutely amazed by anybody who does this on their own. I don't know, I feel like I don't have that sort of brain having.
However, having said that, one thing I've learned from this podcast and speaking with so many businesses is you, you can do pretty much anything.
You know, maybe you won't be the world's experts in every area, but actually so many people start a business, have no experience of retail, of merchandising or any of these things and you do find a way. So I think it's important to say that as well because I don't want anyone listening to me. Cool.
Actually, I couldn't do that either because actually you could. I could if I really had to do it. I could do it to a point at least.
Anna Youngson:No, absolutely. And anyone? Anyone. I think it goes back to time.
You know, there are so many things that you have to, you have to do to have a successful product business and there's. If there's only one of you, it probably means that you're cutting your time in each sector.
You're doing it all and doing it all really well, but you're not devoting enough time to maybe the important things at that point in time.
And that can be quite difficult to realize when you're in the thick of it because you just carry on coasting and you think, yep, no, it's fine, it's all good. And. And then suddenly something will happen in six months time and you think, oh, if I had only planned ahead or thought.
I mean, planning is the key with merchandising.
Thinking ahead and having those building blocks to understand how you've got to those numbers and your clear marketing calendar and a critical path of those key dates that you have in your diary of trigger points to remind you to do certain things. It's so invaluable.
Vicki Weinburg:That makes a lot of sense.
And I'm definitely taking from you that it's really important, sort of know when you're likely to sell more of your product, when you're perhaps likely to sell less depending on what your product is. And that's really, really important. I definitely don't want to end on a negative.
We're going to ask a really positive question after this, but I would love to know, are there any common mistakes you see when it comes to stock management? Perhaps things we haven't spoken about already that you would just like to highlight.
Anna Youngson:Things that we haven't mentioned already. We have covered a lot, so I feel like we probably have mentioned most things. Sales phasing is a key one because.
And just to kind of go back to that, because you might think that something is selling well, you trade back into it, you buy more and then you end up with loads of stock at the end of the season because you've bought extra stock in at a time that is not your peak selling. So understanding your peaks and troughs is really key.
Maybe something that is overlooked that might seem like a bit of a simple, you know, or easy point, but is really easy for people to do is when something happens in whilst you're trading in your marketing calendar, use that as to document all of your trading learns.
So if you've sold out of something and you wish you had more, write it in the week that you sold, you know, have it by week, write it in the week that you've sold out, say, sold out of bestseller. Pink dress could have had more through to Easter, for example, was really late this year. How did that impact your sales?
If you know, with a launching spring summer season, for example, you don't really know until you can guesstimate how it might impact your, your sales. But until you've been there and done it, you don't know. So write that down.
Because at the end of each season, doing a lessons learned on what worked, what didn't work, what could you have done better? And missed opportunity, you know, missed opportunities and a bit of a swap, basically.
It's so difficult to remember everything at the end of each season because there is so much to remember.
But if each week you're just jotting down those little things which don't seem big at the time but will save you so much time and work when you're doing your lessons learned because it will trigger you to be like, oh, yes, I sold out of that bestseller. I need to do some more analysis on xyz.
Or what's another one that's quite a good example of, oh, if you've done promotional activity or markdown activity, keep a log of what that was, what the offer was, how long it ran for, so that when you're looking back historically that you understand why your sales peaked in a certain, you know, time outside of your normal peak, you know, peak selling, to document everything in there. And then that then triggers you to do deeper analysis at the end of each season, which then in turn drives your strategy for next season.
Because you've got all your answers of what you wish you'd done differently. It's just quantifying it and giving it a bit more, you know, context.
Vicki Weinburg:That's so helpful. Thank you. And I guess that also will tell you what's worked and what hasn't worked.
So, because I think we all have much shorter memories than we think we have, it's really easy to think, well, I remember this. But then a year down the line, of course you don't. You think, oh, did I give 20% off or 25? You know, all of these things.
So, yeah, all the things that seem really important at the time, they just fade away, don't they? So that's really good advice to keep track of what you're doing and how it's gone.
Because then presumably if something's worked really well one year, you could think, well, actually I could, you know, do that. You mentioned, like awareness weeks.
You could think, oh, actually I'll do something about awareness week next year because it went really well this year or, or whatever it is. And that will help with your forward planning as well.
Anna Youngson:Yeah, and it. And it helps with your overall marketing plan as well.
You know that merchandising and marketing are very heavily interlinked and you're marketing, you look at different data, but essentially it's still sales data, but from a different platform and different areas where merchandising is very product focused, whereas marketing is customer focused.
Although merchandising, you're always buying product for your customer and it's really important that you understand what your customer needs and wants are. But they're just slightly, you know, slightly different metrics, but they do go hand in hand.
So what you learn from, you know, merchandising and your sales analysis also then lends a hand to driving your marketing strategy as well.
Vicki Weinburg:That makes sense. Thank you. Now we'll end of a. Hi, Anna. After that potentially negative question. No, that was. No, that was me. That was me. It was me who asked it.
But I did like to ask that because I think you've obviously got so much experience and you would have seen so many things from so many different businesses.
Of course, you'd have seen and experienced things that other people wouldn't have and perhaps wouldn't have even thought about either doing or not doing. So that was the reason for that question because, yeah, you've got so much experience. I really want to make the most of it.
My final question is, what is your number one piece of advice for a small product business when it comes to managing stock and cash flow and that kind of thing.
Anna Youngson:Am I allowed to?
Vicki Weinburg:Yes, you can have to.
Anna Youngson:I think. Well, my number one actually is always ask yourself why.
It doesn't matter what you're looking at, whether it's your total business, sales, your product sales, your category sales, your stock analysis. Ask yourself why? Why is something selling? Why is something not selling? And that then drives where to go next. Because when you're.
When you have so much data at your fingertips, it's hard to know where to start. Right. So the key thing is to start at the top and not think about it too much and then. And ask yourself why.
And then that then channels where you then look at the data, you know, the next level of granular data underneath it. So that would be my one number one piece of advice and the secondary one, which we have covered a lot.
So I won't say in loads of detail, but is to have a sales forecast because you gain so much to help manage your cash flow and your stock and your buy budget from that one tool. It is invaluable. So if you don't have one, do it, you know, set one up. Very basic.
Doesn't need to be in a lot of detail by month, perhaps, rather than by week, but give it a go and see what it's telling you.
Vicki Weinburg:That's so helpful. Thank you and thank you for so much for all that you've shared. I feel like I've got a lot of, got a lot of expertise out of you today. Thank you.
Because it's such a big subject, it's. It's so complex. We'll put links everywhere in the show notes.
If people want to find out about more about what you do or maybe they want some help, they can come and find you. And yeah, thank you so much.
Anna Youngson:Oh, thanks for having me, Vicki. It's been lovely to chat.
Vicki Weinburg:Thank you so much for listening.
Right to the end of this episode, do remember that you can get the Fullback catalogue and lots of free resources on my website, vickyweinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this episode episode if you've enjoyed it and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.
