Will your Christmas cash flow jingle or stall?

Hi! Catherine Erdly here, host of the Resilient Retail Game Plan. It’s that time of year when indie retailers either outsmart January’s excess stock blues or get a cash flow headache that lingers long past the mince pies.

In this episode of the resilient retail club podcast, I’m rolling up my sleeves with a no-fluff checklist for peak season stock planning, tested across 25 years and countless Q4s. Forget gut feeling; I’ll help you tune into hard data, smart forecasting, and those golden “hero products” that turn browsers into loyal gift buyers—no corporate jargon, just straight-talking product business advice for real shop floors.

Timestamped summary

00:00 "Prepare Adequately for Christmas Sales"

03:20 "Stock Planning: Gut Feel vs. Data"

09:14 "Focus on HERO Products"

10:12 Optimise Holiday Product Strategy

15:21 Conservative Christmas Sales Planning

16:32 "Planning for Increased Sales Capacity"

19:34 Stock Forecasting Strategy Tips

Let’s connect: DM me @resilientretailclub on Instagram with your favourite takeaway or guest suggestion for a future podcast episode. Don’t forget to follow, rate, and review the Resilient Retail Club podcast in your favourite retail podcast UK app.

And if you want fresh industry insight, check out my Forbes articles on retail trends - https://www.forbes.com/sites/catherineerdly/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Stock doctor

Do you know if you've got the right stock ready for peak season? Or could

you be missing out on sales or even sitting on piles of

unsold stock come January? Having

a clear plan for your stock is the absolute backbone of a

stress free quarter four. We are heading straight

towards quarter four. And yes, it's time to talk about Christmas,

it's time to talk about peak, and it's time to talk about getting your

stock planned out ready to go. What we're going to be going

through in this episode is a simple step by step

checklist of what you need to think about ready for your peak season

success. So this might be an episode where you want to grab a notebook because

by the end you will have a clear plan of action to make sure

that you are ready to go with your stock for the busiest sales

period. So why does stock planning matter?

I spent nearly two decades in big retailers, including some where

Christmas was absolutely the make or break point of the

year. And let me tell you, planning out our stock was half

of the job. It was all about getting ready, getting

prepared, making sure that we had the right stock at the right

place at the right time. And the reason for that is

because stock and sales are completely intertwined. So

if you are relying on Christmas to drive a big bulk of your sales this

year, you're going to want to make sure that your stock is going to support

that. So stock equals cash. It's as simple as that.

Anytime you're spending money on stock, then it is

effectively tying it up. So the right stock strategy can help you free

up cash and boost your profits. There are

dangers galore in the peak season as well. There's dangers of

over buying, so tying up money and space versus under buying

where you might be losing sales. And the peak season

amplifies both those risks. So it is well

worth your time spending a few minutes thinking

about what you want to do to drive your sales at Christmas and checking that

you've got the right stock to support you. So, for

example, I spoke to a client in January who

had had an amazing start to their Christmas season, but because they hadn't

really recognized just how much their sales have been ramping up,

they sold out well before the peak sales really kicked in and

left money on the table. And every year I speak to

people who have got themselves in a difficult situation on the other way

around, that they've overbought for Christmas or they've overbought in that

peak holiday period and therefore they're ending up sitting on

far more cash than they should in January. So what we're going

to do today is walk through some simple steps to

try and get, get ahead of the Christmas rush and

to give you that peace of mind that you are in a good position

going into peak. And one of my favorite stories, if you're thinking, well, I,

I should know this stuff by now, one of my favorite stories is I worked

with a client, they're a fashion brand, and they came to me because actually they'd

been to a Shopify event all about Black Friday

Cyber Monday. And specifically what they wanted support with

was how much stock they should have for this big event, which was a huge

piece of their yearly sales that they were planning.

And they talked all about getting ready for Cyber Monday, Black Friday,

Cyber Monday. And then afterwards, he went up to the person who

presented and said, well, how do I actually work out how much stock I need

to have? And the person said, oh, it's really about your gut feel. You need

to go with your gut. And for me, the reason that

I love this story is because it tells me that these kind of things, this

kind of information is really important, that there isn't enough out there about how you

actually work this stuff out. And secondly, it just goes to show that lots

of people who maybe are pretty high up in the e commerce world, in the

retail world, this is not an area that even they know about

necessarily. If you're ever thinking, how do I figure this out? How do I even

do it? Then we're going to unpack some of that today.

So the first thing you want to do, nice and simple is,

is you want to look at last year's sales data.

Now, it's possible that you're listening to this podcast and this is your first ever

Christmas, in which case you're going to have to skip this step. Although I would

say, arguably I would have a look at what you've been selling so far

because it's going to give you some clues as to what your bestsellers are going

to be at Christmas as well. But let's say that this is

not your first Christmas, which I'm sure for a lot of you it won't be.

And so we're going to start with a bit of a review. Now, my favorite

thing to do in January, I do it every year inside the membership group Resilient

Retail Club, is we have a lessons learned and strategy

session which is all about recapping Christmas.

And so we do it in January because we know

that people forget and years gets busy and

you think they'll never forget what happened last Christmas, but you can easily.

And so what we want to do here is, ideally you'd have done this in

January, but bearing in mind that there's the best time to plant a

tree was 50 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today.

So let's go for it. We're going to dive in and look at last year's

performance. And the beauty is most reporting systems will just let

you change the dates and look back and it should be pretty easy for you

to get this information. So what we're looking for here is

what your best sellers were. We want to know what your best

selling products were during the Christmas time period. And it's up to you

what you consider the Christmas time period. You might want to consider the months of

November and December together. You might want to look at the whole fourth quarter

October through to Christmas, it's up to you. But during that Christmas selling

period, however you define it, what sold best, Have a look at

your best sellers and more importantly, how many of those did you sell?

You're looking for the 80% of sales products.

So 20% of your products most likely are going to be generating

80% of your sales. These are the ones you want to get right. So if

you've got hundreds of products, don't worry, just focus on your top

sellers because that is going to be what makes or breaks it.

So you're going to want to know what, what your bestsellers were and how many

you sold of them and then also have a look. What products did

maybe don't pop up on the bestseller list, but you know that as you scroll

down the list and you look through, you think, oh, do you know what we

sold out to that really early? Ironically, one of the things that happens,

especially in independent retailers in bricks and mortar, is when you

sell out of something, you no longer see it. So it can almost drop out

of your mind. But just take a time to think through. Were there things that

you bought and just went really quickly that you could have sold more of? And

were there products that even if they sold quite well, had they declined year on

year? Are you beginning to get the sense from your customer that they're moving away?

And most importantly, you want to take the lessons from this data. You don't just

want to look at this data just so that you know how that you sold

400 of the Star ornament in the month of November and December.

You want to really go through it and look and say what worked well, that

I need to do more of. Okay, those, those ornaments were great.

Can I bring more in? Okay. I equally had

another type of decoration that usually was my bestseller but had dropped

down. Okay, do I retire it? Do I replace slow movers? And

where did I miss out? Where did I have products that I definitely could have

sold more of? So once you've completed all of that

analysis, then what I'd encourage you to do is

identify your hero products. So your hero

product does not have to be Christmassy. It doesn't mean that you

can't make it a little bit more festive with some festive packaging or

something like that, just for the Christmas time period. But when I talk

about Christmas hero products because it has the word Christmas in

or peak, then people tend to think, oh, does it have to be themed?

The answer is absolutely not. The most important thing is that

it's giftable. So what is your best selling giftable item

year round and is that applicable for Christmas? Chances are probably yes.

Chances are that's probably going to be your hero product.

Now you may want to have different hero products.

You may have one which fits into the five to ten pound price point

that's great for stocking fillers. There's the 20 to 30

pound gifting sweet spot, which is also really important at

Christmas time. And then there's also that 50 pound plus for special

gifts. Now if you sell jewelry, for example, you

may not have all of those different price points mapped out. That's absolutely

fine. You still want to map out your hero product, the one that people are

most likely to want to buy as a gift at Christmas. But

equally so, if you are somebody who has lots of different products, you're selling

lots of different ranges from different brands, then you

definitely want to pull out your hero products, not just one hero

product, but across the price points. So why are hero

products so important? Well, it just helps you keep organized, it helps

you keep focused. You can make sure that you have at least some kind

of photography that will help you sell it as a Christmasy item.

You can focus. If you're going to be doing PR outreach, for example, or

trying to get into gift guides, then that's what you focus on with your hero

product. You want it on your homepage, you want it as part of your email

campaigns, you want it in your social media, for example. And picking

those products now means that you become really focused and really clear

as you're going through the season rather than each week thinking, right, well, what

do I talk about? What do I talk about now? So make sure you've got

those HERO products mapped out. And the other

thing that is useful about mapping out your product, your HERO products.

So if we come on to step three is it also allows you to review

your range and fill your gaps. So for example,

you might be doing this exercise thinking, what do I really want to focus on?

And then you suddenly realize, well, I really don't think I've got any strong

contenders for stocking fillers this year. Or

actually everything that I've got is either under 10 pounds or over

50. I really don't have anything in that 20 to 30 pound

gifting sweet spot. So it can be a really useful exercise to

help you think about what you might need to tweak. Are there any

gaps that you need to bring in? Now, depending on how you source

your product, this ship may have sailed. You may not be able to get any

new products in for the Christmas season, in which case you're just going to have

to think about how you can work your messaging to support the products you do

have. But for lots of you, where maybe you're designing your own products or,

or perhaps you're buying products in from other people, you are going to be able

to make those last minute tweaks, have a look through, have

a look at everything that you've got, pull out what you think your heroes

are going to be. It's also good, you don't necessarily want to just

talk about your heroes all the way through the long Christmas promotional

period. So you may want to pick up, pick out some alternates as well in

each category. But then just have a look and think, am I missing anything?

Again, if you're somebody who is a lifestyle store, for example, a gifting

store, have you covered off almost, think about what marketing messages

you might want to send out during that time period and if you've got the

product for it. So you might want to do gifts for her, you might want

to do gifts by interest. So for gardeners or for

bikers or wild swimmers, you might want to think

about hostess gifts and Christmas

party earrings and Christmas Day jewelry and think about

all the different messages and then just think, do I have the product to support

that. It's much easier to do this now before you get into the busy

time period than to arrive in November and December and think,

oh, I wish I could do a gift guide for under 10 pound gifts, but

I've really just got this one item. So really look strategically at

your range at this point and if you are able to make changes,

then have A look and think about where you can fill in the gaps because

it will make life so much easier for you as you move through throughout the

season. So step four is

set your launch dates. So this

is something that comes up a lot. When

do you launch Christmas? And it

depends. It's what you're used to in your business, what's worked for you in the

past. But I would say very broadly speaking, you can have a

soft launch. In other words, put it out in store without making a fanfare about

it, or put it up on your website, maybe even in September or

October. But then generally speaking, the point in which we can

all agree that it all becomes Christmas, all consuming, all

Christmas, or as one of my clients once called it, screaming Christmas,

is post Bonfire Night. So we get through

Halloween, we get through Bonfire Night, and then pretty much it

switches over and we're talking about Christmas. So most people will do their

full Christmas launch that will be coming up at the

beginning of November. So have a think about

when you want to talk about it. Have a think about things like

when your emails will go out to talk about it, when do you need to

have photo shoots done ready for those emails,

when do you want to pitch to pr, if that's something that you're going to

be doing. And then you can work backwards from your chosen launch

date to make sure that you map out your content and you

map out your promotions. Once you set your dates, then

that helps you work backwards from that, making sure that you've done everything you

need ready to go for your launch. So you can even

map out when you're going to create your content. You could do it ahead of

time. Why not do it in September? It's a much better month to try

and prep all of your Christmas marketing, for example, than trying to do it

all in the peak time period. So pick your dates and then

also pick, like when do you think are going to be the peak selling periods

for these products? Because that brings us on to step five, which is all about

forecasting your sales. So you've looked

at last year, what you sold, you've looked at this year, what you're building, all

of your ranges around, you've identified. If there's any

gaps, you filled those in. Now it's time for you to

think about what you believe that you are actually going to

sell. So how do you do that? Well, again, if

this is your first Christmas, it may be a little bit tricky, but I would

just say, say have a think about what kind of an uplift you might Expect.

Do you think that if you sell 10 of something in an average week,

maybe assume that you will sell double that in November and December.

As long as you have logical assumptions, you're going to be able to tweak

and refine it so that in future years you will have better information.

But for this year, you are just going to have to go with an educated

guess, something that seems logical, that you've

worked through. But ultimately, until you get into a Christmas season and

see how it reacts for you, you won't necessarily know. So for

everybody else you can use historical sales data. So if you

believe that your number one item is going to be the lavender candle

this year, last year you sold a hundred lavender candles, but this

year so far your sales are pretty much double what they've been to this

point last year, then you could say, right, well I think I'm going to sell

about 200 lavender candles. Then you

could say, well, I think I'm going to sell about 200 lavender candles this year.

So for example, you're just taking a combination of your

current sales performance and your last year's sales performance,

putting them together and coming up with an estimate. So that is what you

call your run rate. So your run rate is how you're currently performing against

last year. So if your sales are double what they were last year to

this point, then you can, you could assume, you could take an

educated guess that your Christmas sales are going to be double. For example,

you can also go through and if you think actually that feels

really punchy. I don't like the idea of planning my Christmas sales at double,

then sure, by all means, be really conservative. I'm quite often

conservative when I'm planning out one to one clients and looking

at their Christmas sales. I tend to slightly under plan just

because sometimes you

just can't physically process twice as many products

as last year. So you need to be a little mindful of what's actually going

to be going on in the business. Do you think that you're going to hit

those numbers? And if it feels too scary and too

like you could have to over commit to stock in order to hit those numbers,

maybe pull it back slightly on the basis that it's better to under promise and

over deliver than to set yourself really crazy big targets and then be

disappointed if you don't hit them. So

if it's a new product again, you could have a look at and say my

best selling item usually sells about 50 a week during the

Christmas period and we've got eight weeks of promotion. So I think

that's going to be about 400 units because I think this new product is

going to be one of my best sellers. That's why I've chosen it as my

hero product. So for each one you want to go through and logically look

at, for your, each one of your hero products you want to logically go

through, look at what did I sell last year? Either this product or an

equivalent product. What's my uplift? I think for this year, therefore,

what do I think I'm going to be generating?

And again, it is an estimate, right? So

you're, you don't know for sure the all sorts of different things that can

happen. It can also actually help you to work out when you

do this exercise to kind of go through and go, well, hang on a minute,

if I was selling 200 of those a day, can I even physically

dispatch that? Again, any work that you can do to check through those

assumptions now, as opposed to waking up in November and realizing that

you've got a capacity issue, anything that you can do now is super, super

helpful. So do think through what this actually means. If you're planning

double the sales of last year, just think to yourself, now, can I physically

do that? Who do I need to bring in? Do I need more space? Do

I need more resources? That's, that's a whole other piece of work. But

then when you're looking at the individual product

lines, then always ask yourself this very, very important

question when it comes to your Christmas purchasing. Which is

worse, having too much or not enough?

And ask yourself that for every single product that you're ordering ready

for Christmas. And there's two different ways of looking at this.

Some products are Christmas specific. They are

what I like to call brown bananas, which means that on the 26th of

December, nobody's going to want to touch them. So that's anything that says Merry

Christmas, that's an Advent calendar after we've got past about

3rd December. It's anything that's got a really clear

cutoff. Those products, generally speaking, if you ask

yourself that question, which is worth having too much or not having enough, the answer

is going to be having too much. Because if you're left with it,

you can't do anything with it for a whole year. You're just going to have

to sit on that stock, which is basically cash tied up in your business for

an entire year. So those are the products that you, generally

speaking, want to under buy. You want to be out of stock of those

really before Christmas so that you're not left either having to mark

them down significantly in a clearance sale to get rid of them or sit

on them for a whole year, store them somewhere and bring them back out for

Christmas. So those types of products, generally speaking, the question

which is worse, having too much or not enough? The answer is going to be

it's going to be worse for me to have too much. So therefore when you're

planning out your quantities, you're going to bring those quantities down, you're going to be

a bit more conservative. Now, your year round

bestsellers going back to this lavender candle, the question

which is worse, having too much or not enough? Well, actually if I've got too

much, I'm just gonna have more in January. I won't have to place an order

in January, that's actually absolutely fine. But if I run

out of my key bestseller halfway through the season, that's gonna be a

real pain for me. That's gonna mean that all of the effort that I'm putting

into these ads, into these campaigns, everything that I've got lined up, that's

all going to be for nothing. So therefore, that is an

item where when you do your analysis, maybe you add a buffer on you do

right. I think I'm probably going to sell 200, but you know what, I'm going

to buy 250 because it's worse for me if I have not

enough. So for every single product you go through, ask yourself that

question which is worse, having too much or not enough?

And then using that, adjust your forecasts

accordingly. So either bump it up a little bit to make sure that you don't

run out or pull it back so that you're not going to be left

sitting on extra stock. So

once you have done all of those things, then

final step, step six is to double check all of your orders and your

supplier lead times now. So if you are somebody who hand

makes your product, then you want to prep all of your components early.

Lots of people I know actually work throughout the summer to get their Christmas stock

ready. So obviously that's a little late now, but do

have a look and see what you can do to make sure that you've done

your work ahead of time. If you're

like most retailers, this will be a tricky time to be bringing an

intake. I know for a fact that there's a real cash flow pinch point at

this time of year in September, October if you are a

retailer. Lots of people I know get around it by using things like FAIR and

their payment terms. To help push the payment back further.

So I do appreciate that it's a tricky time of year, but if at all

possible you, if you've got products that you know are going to be a really

important time, really important part of your Christmas marketing

and now is the time to bring them in. So

this is your little checklist for you to go through. So number one,

review last year's performance. Number two, identify your hero products.

Number three, fill in any price point gaps or any gaps in the range that

you feel might need to be attended to. Number four, plan out your launch dates

for Christmas. Number five, forecast your sales by line and ask yourself

that all important question, which is more important, which is worse, having

too much or not having enough? And then make sure that you put in a

plan and you secure and prepare your stocks that you are going to

have the stock in time for Christmas. And if you're listening to this

thinking this sounds great but I just don't have time for any of this, then

I would love for you to check out the stock doctor service. It's at resilient

retail club.com stockdoctor and we have a done for

you service where trained retail professionals will come in and help you get ready

for your best Christmas yet. Thank you so much for listening and

I'll see you next week.