Hi, I'm Clare Bailey, The Retail Champion.

In Part 1 of the Stock Illusion series, we explored the customer-facing cost of over-ranging — the overwhelm, the choice paralysis, the damage to the shopping experience. Now it's time to go deeper.

In this episode, I'm looking at the operational reality of range creep — how it happens, why it feels like good management when it's actually slowly destroying your margins, and what data-driven decisions really look like when you're editing a range.

Because here's the truth: most businesses don't suddenly wake up with bloated ranges. It creeps in. A new line because a category's doing well. Another colourway because the grey one sells. A supplier introducing something low-risk. And before long, the range is running the business — not the other way around.

What We Cover

• Why range creep feels like good management until it really doesn't

• The difference between sales performance and margin performance — and why it matters

• Why retailers develop emotional attachments to products that are quietly killing their profitability

• Product lifecycle management: every product has a beginning and an end

• How exception reporting helps you catch decline before it's too late

• Why e-commerce has made range discipline harder, not easier

• What the best retailers do differently — continuous curation, not annual reviews

• Why clarity gives control: and how a curated range is better commercially and operationally

• A sneak preview of what's coming in Part Three

Key Takeaways

• Adding is easy. Editing is where the hard — and most valuable — work happens

• Your top seller by sales volume might not be your most profitable product

• Products don't get culled because of emotion — and that's costing you money

• Good retail doesn't run on nostalgia. It runs on relevancy

• The strongest retailers make as many quality exit decisions as entry decisions

Resources & Links

• Free Stock Assessment & Mini Guide: retailchampion.co.uk/retail-playbooks

• The Retail Champion: www.retailchampion.co.uk

• Other episodes: retailreckoningpodcast.co.uk

• Newsletter: retailreckoningpodcast.co.uk/newsletter

Subscribe to Retail Reckoning wherever you get your podcasts.

Connect & Share

If this episode resonated — and if you recognised your own business in any of it — I'd love to hear from you. Leave a review, share it with a fellow retailer, or come and find me on social media. Let's keep the conversation going.

Do you have range creep?

Have you lost control without even noticing?

Are you over-ranged with low margins, have to discount, a

mountain of stock in the stockroom?

And this is the case of many perfectly good retail businesses, and this is

part two of the Stock Illusion series.

I'm Clare Bailey.

This is Retail Reckoning, and welcome back.

In part one, we talked about something that a lot of retailers are feeling right

now, and that's the fact that businesses don't necessarily have a demand problem.

They've got a decision-making problem.

They've got too much stock, too many products overlap each other,

cannibalize sales, too much complexity, and that's all sitting underneath an

actual sensible customer experience.

We're overwhelming people.

But I want to move away from the customer side of the conversation that

we focused on in part one and look at something a lot more operational, where

it's about data, decision-making, and everything that creates great ranging and

a curated range that people wanna buy.

I don't think businesses suddenly wake up one morning with bloated

ranges or duplicated stock, messy categories, warehouses full of

products that nobody's going to buy.

I actually think that the situation gets built so slowly,

and that's what makes it dangerous.

That's why I called it range creep.

It isn't feeling like bad management while it's happening.

Usually, it feels like good management, and that's where we fall into the trap.

You might add a new line because the category's performing well, and it,

that seems like a good idea at the time.

Or a supplier, they introduce another product and they show it to you and

you think, "Oh, that's quite low risk. Let's test it." Okay, fair enough.

And then you get a best seller, and it gets duplicated by the supplier

into another color or another finish.

And we say to ourselves something like, "If the gray one sells, surely

the navy one will too." That doesn't feel particularly bad decision-making.

It doesn't feel reckless.

It just feels like steady expansion.

And that's the issue, that most businesses rarely notice this is happening until

suddenly the range has become so big, so heavy, so more operationally complicated,

and it's not what anyone ever intended

But here's the important bit.

Most businesses did not actually grow their range strategically.

It's very much more reactive, and that really matters because

reactive buying creates almost, call it an addictive culture.

You feel like if something is selling well, we have more versions,

we have another colorway, we have some more sizes, or a competitor

launches something, and therefore we've got to match it, haven't we?

Well, actually, have we?

And then you've got the suppliers.

They're pushing another range, and we take it just in case 'cause we

don't wanna left, get left behind.

We don't want the competition to steal the march, and so

you just keep adding products.

And without anyone consciously really thinking about it, the default setting

inside the business is to buy more stuff.

Because adding is the easy bit.

I mean, obviously, apart from the cash flow implications.

Editing is where it gets hard The adding feels, I guess, sort of optimistic,

like you're being proactive, like you're giving customers choice.

But removing products can feel painful, and it feels more uncommercial in a way.

And the editing forces those difficult decisions, which should be data-driven.

Editing a range, you look at your top and bottom sellers by sales value, and you

clap your hands and say, "I'm doing really well." But if you look at them by margin

value, it might be a very different story.

I remember working with a pet shop retailer who thought their fastest-selling

item, 'cause it was if you just looked at sales, was a salmon-based product.

And in fact, it wasn't that at all.

It was a chicken-based product.

when you, when you start discovering the information in your business and

analyzing the range on the data and making data-driven decisions, which

is kind of my geeking out moment where everything has to be based on the data,

and you have to ask yourself, "But why?"

also, it's more important to make sure that you're picking the products that

stay on the range that not only deliver sales and satisfy customers' needs, yes,

of course, that brings footfall, that brings basket size and repeat business,

but it's also about does the data tell you that that's actually making you any money?

Is it hitting you in the pocket or not?

And that's what forces those difficult decisions because you have

to make a decision between, let's say, the salmon or the chicken.

Well, if the person that buys the salmon, if you look at receipt level

data, is also buying lots of other things, so their total basket value

is really high, then great, keep it.

If it isn't, if it's just a vanity product that gives you a high sales

line and a low margin, that's when the decision has to be culled.

And this is why products don't get culled, because it can become emotional.

You say, "Well, it's my top seller. If I take that off the range, what

will people buy?" well, actually, if you haven't got salmon, they'll

probably buy chicken anyway.

So that's why it becomes emotionally protected, and it constantly happens.

So many retailers I know develop these sort of emotional attachments

to products because it's something they like, or they like the supplier,

or they've got a fondness for the category, or, what else could it be?

A historic best seller.

there's products sitting in ranges that probably shouldn't be, and they're only

surviving the cull because somebody's thinking, "Well, it used to be really

good," or " We've always sold that," or, "People might like it again in future.

I don't want to get rid of it." Yeah, great.

Maybe.

But good retail doesn't run on nostalgia, it runs on relevancy,

and that changes over time.

It expires.

Customers' needs and wants change.

Our tastes and preferences change.

We get told we used to think something was good for us and it isn't anymore,

or colors or fashion or whatever.

It, across all sectors and this is one of the biggest operational issues that

retailers struggle with because Of course, every product on your range, you

brought it into the business for a reason.

But what if the reason's expired?

don't you ask yourself, "Does the reason that I brought this in still exist?" And

that's where we have to revert to things like product life cycle management.

We've got a playbook on that actually at retailchampion.co.uk/retail-playbooks.

Um, we also think about products are very good at launch, and I

mean, everybody loves a good launch.

We've got a whole new season coming out.

We're gonna do launch meetings, press releases, plans, merchandising, all these

marketing campaigns, and everyone gets really, really excited about the newness.

But no one is particularly excited about the exits because

that normally comes at a cost.

There's normally obsolete stock.

You've got to discount.

You've got to manage out the supplier potentially, and it's

a completely different story.

But what frustrates me as a supply chain person more than a product

management person, my colleague Kim does that brilliantly.

we complement each other.

So it's a completely different story.

Products enter with this sort of fanfare and ceremony, and they feel like they're

leaving because of neglect, but products have to leave the range, and that's what

a good supply chain management or product life cycle management person will do.

They will be able to manage through the entry to the exit.

Things do not need to linger.

As performance deteriorates and you start to watch, and this is really important

when it comes to data and systems as well, you can use exceptional reporting.

As performance starts to downturn, it isn't necessarily immediately noticeable,

but systems can help you notice it quicker than perhaps you might otherwise.

And when your old winners are slowly becoming average and then maybe weak, it

was time to get rid of them when they'd gone from high performance to average.

It was time to start planning the exit because when you see a

product decline, it's not normally dramatically fast, but it happens.

But what happens as well, many retailers, they just keep them on

and on and on, and it's sitting there gathering dust on the shelf.

It's tying up your money, and it's just not worth having.

So eventually you end up with a range that's much harder to manage, much harder

to merchandise, and ultimately it's much harder to trade it profitably because

discounting will necessarily have to happen to keep things moving, promotions

to keep things moving, and that's where the range creep gets expensive.

It's starting to cost you money.

And it's not always because products are individually disastrous or because

they're a, a, a problem product.

It's just they've passed their sell-by date in the metaphorical meaning.

Um, obviously if they pass their sell-by date in the food world,

that's definitely not something you want to keep on the shelf.

But collectively, all this stuff is just creating operational complexity.

It needs to be priced, it needs to be promoted, it needs to be managed on

the EPOS, it needs to be listed on the website, and complexity is expensive.

You've got to do more forecasting, more supplier management

Essentially, all these products just create more operational noise for every

single department in the business, from marketing through merchandising,

buying, supply chain, the lot.

And that's where a business has hit the dangerous point because

it's no longer managing the range.

I'd go as far as to say the range is managing the business, and

that's when teams are spending so much of their time reacting.

Do we need to run a promotion?

Well, how are we gonna manage the stock?

How are we gonna clear the warehouses?

And they're not thinking strategically.

They all feel busy, but it's not necessarily the most effective or

profitable way of going around things.

And that's why I say legacy stock keeping units, SKUs, however you want to call

them, products, they become kind of a killer of margin inside a retailer

because there's never any sort of dramatic failures, but people stop questioning the

products anymore instead of analyzing, questioning all the time, and creating

a well-edited, well-curated range.

E-commerce has made this even easier to ignore as a problem, in all fairness,

because, well, physical stores, obviously you have to force the discipline of range

count because, well, space runs out.

You've only got so much room on the shelves.

Websites do not.

And, I mean, b- back to part one when I talked about the overwhelm,

when you look at some of the online retailers and it's just like there's

so much stuff, where do you start?

Websites never end in terms of capacity to offer more categories, more colors,

more variants, more pages, more filters, and it's like, "Argh, I can't take

it anymore." And so you end up with so much duplicated product

architecture, and nobody's probably reviewed it in years, but that still

has to sit in a warehouse somewhere.

That still takes up your supply chain capacity, and it creates management noise.

You've got to set the product up.

You've got to put the descriptions together, the photography, the

data, the pricing, and so on, and it just adds so much, and that's

where the operational pain sets in.

It's across your systems, warehousing, merchandising, stock holding, photography.

I could go on.

But I think that a lot of retail businesses fail to recognize how much

profitability is lost in managing too many products, and it's just draining them of

the potential of being clearly curated.

And I do think the strongest retailers right now are those who curate the

range, and they have discipline, and they have exception reporting that

triggers that moment of the highest selling product has just gone to average.

Right, okay, I need to start looking at that then.

And that's the difference.

It's much more intentional.

It's a lot less emotional, and arguably it's a lot less lazy, 'cause once a

product's set up on the e-commerce, might wells- might as well leave it there.

There'll be some automated replenishment in the background.

Suppliers will just get an order triggered when, you know, it drops to

a minimum level, and it just happens.

But that isn't really giving you the best profitability, the best use of

your cash flow, or indeed the best customer experience due to the overwhelm

So I would say that the best retailers I've met, they have systems in place

that mean that they review the range continuously, not just annually.

And there's reports and triggers which aren't complicated or expensive.

A, a simple EPoS system can do exception reporting, but it can trigger

when a rate of sale drops, and then consistently drops for two or three weeks.

And that can again trigger the person to think, "Hmm, something's

not quite right with that product."

And I would also say the best retailers I've ever met make as many quality exit

decisions as they do with entry decisions, because that's really fundamental.

A range is not just a collection of products, it's choices, and

product lifecycle management.

You know, everything has a beginning, but quite a lot of things have an end.

And some of those things, if they're seasonal or fashionable, that could

be quite a short timeframe, or if it's much more standard basics, you

know, everyday kitchen essentials, for example, that could have a

life cycle of a very long time.

But whatever the life cycle is, a range is a system of choices, and

that requires maintenance and editing relentlessly, bringing in and taking out

And I'm not gonna say a small range is always better because

for some people, variety retail, a large range is important.

But clarity is even more important because clarity gives control.

It explains who you are and who you stand for to your customer.

It's great operationally, commercially.

And what I'm gonna say now is in the final episode of this series,

I'm gonna pull all of this together.

So talking about stock pressures and range creep, the next question will be more

around if more is not the answer, what is?

How do you design a buying and ranging strategy that I guess protects

your margins instead of eroding it, but also talks to your customer?

it's got clearer vision, entry point structure, and the commercial control.

And I guess the most important question is how do you stop the

complexity of a range taking over the business in the first place?

So if you're listening to this and recognizing parts of your own

business in this conversation, well, good, because most businesses

already know that there's clutter and it's not being managed properly.

And there's products that nobody's challenged in years because

maybe the managing directors thinks it's their favorite.

And you know where the temporary seasonal edition sort of accidentally

became permanent baggage.

And what I think a lot of businesses lack is a structured way to assess

how serious the issues become for them and what they need to do about it.

So that's why I've created a free stock assessment and companion mini guide,

and that's gonna help you identify where you've got overlap, duplication, hidden

complexity, old stock that's just tying up cash flow, damaging your margin, holding

you back, and also taking up space.

So there's the wider choice of the playbooks that I mentioned earlier.

Uh, the mini guide will be there as well.

And if you want to sign up for weekly insights and updates

around this podcast, we've got the Retail Reckoning newsletter at

retailreckoningpodcast.co.uk/newsletter.

You can also pop to the Retail Champion website and pick up my phone

number and just give me a shout.

Ping me on WhatsApp to make sure I'm not on another call, and

I'll be delighted to have a chat.

I'm Clare Bailey.

This is Retail Reckoning, and I'll be talking to you again in the final

part of the Stock Illusion series.