In Blog #131 I talked about why it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. In this blog I want to talk How we worked iInventory down Successfully.

There was a buyer in Southern Calif. That was famous for working his inventory efficiently. Word had it he had a secret drawer. Inventory cut was the 21st of each month and he would hold his excess PO’s in this drawer and put them on the system on the 23rd. 

This gave him 30 days to work his inventory down. Phone calls were made and deals were struck.His business was usually pretty good so there must have been something to it. I needed to find space in my stockroom for 1,000 pairs of UGGS that were arriving in October.

How we worked inventory down Successfully

I started making phone calls and striking deals. We were moving our slow sellers out to other stores that were having success with them. It was a win for both stores. We started dropping the boxes down from the top as we sent shoes out. Because of space constraints the Palo Alto store had really high stock shelves. 

In fact they were so high we had to use reach sticks to get down shoes from the top. They were long poles that had an attachment at the end. The attachment would fit into the top of the lid and slide underneath the box. It was an art sometimes to retrieve shoes.

Other ways

We also requested return authorizations from the brands or would swap out slow sellers for hot items. Nordstrom only had sales 3 times a year, June Half Yearly, July Anniversary sale and November Half Yearly. This made it more difficult to move slow sellers through markdowns, but if I had that opportunity I certainly would have used that too.

After a few weeks, we were looking pretty good. This was going to be very interesting to say the least.