How Long Should a Thrift Item Live?
Good question!
Every item on a sales floor is using space, time, and money. Any successful retailer gets a return on those investments.
In some ways, it’s the same calculation traditional retail makes, just with different timelines and scale in thrift.
Too much stale merchandise (under producing) on a sales floor turns off shoppers and they quit coming in. Too many fresh goods (over producing) can create a financial burden, overpack a store and be hard to shop. Even worse, a partly empty sales floor.
Franky, I have found it hard to overproduce in any sustained way as shoppers tend to reward a very fresh store.
So where is the balance?
Assuming sufficient donations are coming in:
Have a regular and disciplined process to mark down and then move stale goods off of the sales floor. Whenever possible find a way to recycle them or provide a last chance to sell them somewhere.
Know the life cycle of thrifted goods categories. Different product groups have different cycles. Home decor is pretty short, textiles not quite as short, furniture and higher ticket goods, a little longer. Generally, the largest chunk of what will sell sells in the first week it’s out for sale, and less and less sell each week after. In my experience, for example, four-week-old textiles were just filling space.
Budget how much needs to go to the floor each week. It’s working backward from sales and average price per item, selling through percent to reach your production goal.
Be disciplined investing labor directly in production. Pulling someone from production to deal with the problem of the moment is so easy. It’s also so expensive as the freshness of the sales floor is reduced.
You may have noticed that I use the word disciplined more than once. Any successful production and rejecting cycle requires a regular cadence.
Check these out:
A simple production goals calculator.
Production tracker worksheets.
Fresh - Full - Organized - Priced Fairly. That’s the ticket.
Lots of ways to connect with me:
I am happy to connect on LinkedIn.
Check out some great custom artwork at my Redbubble site.
You can also find me on Pinterest.
Check out my Online Sellers book on Amazon.
Tim Gebauer - Thrift Retailer
Thanks for reading!