Dead stock: an honest playbook
Dead stock management is a decision practice: age it honestly, price it to leave, pick the clearance channel — and stop the next pile from forming.
Why dead stock survives every good intention
Nobody keeps dead stock out of ignorance.
Hope
The design might move again.
Arithmetic
On paper the pile still carries its purchase value, and clearing it means booking a loss.
The honest sentence that unlocks the whole practice: the loss happened when the market moved on. The clearance only admits it. Once that is said aloud, how to manage dead stock becomes a sequence of decisions instead of a mood.
Age the stock honestly
Define dead by the calendar, not by feel: months without movement, with the threshold set per category — a fast-moving fitting goes stale far sooner than a classic profile.
Review both on fixed dates.
Slow moving- The warning list — still saveable by placement or a push
- Examined on a schedule — not when somebody trips over it
Dead- The decision list — past saving at full price
- Threshold set per category — a fast-moving fitting goes stale sooner than a classic profile
A pile examined on a schedule shrinks; a pile examined when someone trips over it grows.
Price the stock to leave
The first cut is the cheapest
Every month held adds rent, dust and distance from fashion. The price that clears at the first review beats the lower one accepted two years later.
The rack, not the invoice
Price against the rack's and the cash's next best use. The invoice is history; the rack is opportunity.
Decide the floor in advance
The price below which the goods are worth more as goodwill — gifted to the carpenter who sends you work — than as inventory.
Pick the channel
Dead stock clearance is a matching problem: the goods are wrong for whoever stopped buying them, and right for someone else.
The usual doors, in order:
Whichever door, the pile moves only when people can see what is in it — a priced list with photographs, not a rumour of a bargain in the back room.
Stop the next pile
Every clearance list is a graded exam of your buying.
The design that died, the depth that was too deep, the brand bet that missed — read the list before the next season's ordering, and the pile stops being a recurring character in the business.
The module that runs the playbook
Everything above is a practice; the module is its running form — the pile counted, valued, photographed and turned into a clearance list the trade can act on:
Pick your ten longest-standing items tonight — then watch them become a list at a demo.
Ask for a demo