Picture a retail buyer, six months after placing their biggest order of the year. The bestsellers sold out in three weeks—brilliant.

The marketing team is already planning to reorder them in bulk. The CEO is pleased.

Meanwhile, £80,000 worth of perfectly good inventory sits in the warehouse, ageing like milk. It looked great in the showroom. The samples were gorgeous. But nobody’s buying it, and everyone’s pretending this isn’t happening because dealing with dead stock is considerably less exciting than celebrating winners.

Anna Whalley, a retail consultant and merchandising expert, highlights a recurring issue: retailers lose money not because they can’t identify top products, but because they avoid addressing underperformers. In our latest Browse Basket Buy conversation, she emphasised this critical point.

What merchandising actually means

Most people think merchandising is about window displays and product photography. That’s visual merchandising—a discipline entirely different from the others.

Merchandising is about five essentials: the right product, the right place, the right price, the right time, and the right quantity. Miss any, and profits suffer.

Launch a lightweight summer range in winter? You’ve failed. Stock gorgeous tops, but forget to buy enough bottoms to complete the outfit? Your range doesn’t work, and customers won’t make a purchase.

It sounds obvious. Yet Anna’s entire career has been built on helping businesses get these fundamentals right—because getting them wrong is remarkably easy and spectacularly expensive.

The customer board technique

Everyone says “know your customer.” Most people stop at demographics and feel they’ve done the work.

Anna’s teams used to keep a board in the room during buying sessions with specific details about their target customer: her name, age, spending habits, and how she’d use the product. They’d hold up items and ask: “We love this. Does it fit our customer?”

If the answer was no, it didn’t get bought. Regardless of how beautiful it was.

This isn’t about gut feeling—it’s about building a framework for objective decisions before committing capital to inventory. After the startup phase, you have something stronger than intuition: purchase data. Purchases provide clear, actionable insights.

Look beyond headline sales figures. For example, seeing that ‘occasion wear made £50k last year’ might appear promising.

On closer inspection, however, much of that revenue is likely from heavy markdowns, yielding little profit. Often, the real success lies in versatile pieces that customers use in different ways.

That tells you something useful: keep a small selection of versatile occasion pieces and redirect that budget to products that actually generate revenue.

The bestseller trap

It’s tempting to keep buying bestsellers. Anna is direct: “If you keep pushing the same products, customers get bored, saturation hits, and markdowns follow because everyone already owns them.”

You need variety. New products. Things that stretch your range and keep customers interested.

But—and this is the critical balance—you also need depth in your bestsellers. Being out of stock on a bestseller means you’ve lost that sale forever.

That customer isn’t coming back tomorrow to check if you’ve restocked. They’ll buy from your competitor who had stock when they wanted it.

Anna recommends an 80/20 split: 80% proven sellers, 20% new products. Adjust as needed to strike a balance between stability and innovation.

Fast fashion changed everything (even if you’re not fast fashion)

The shift to fast fashion fundamentally altered customer expectations. Products arrive faster, trends move quicker, and customers expect newness constantly.

For online retailers, success now requires consistent product introductions to drive repeat business and rapid response when products underperform, rather than relying solely on isolated seasonal drops.

What is the advantage of online? You can test products quickly, see what’s working in days, not weeks, and react fast. The disadvantage? Your competitors can do the same thing.

Anna’s emphatic about the pace required: “A day here is like a week before. It’s so critical.”

This isn’t about creating anxiety—it’s about building systems that let you make fast decisions without panic. If your data process involves hours of spreadsheet wrangling, you’re already reacting too slowly.

Why your worst sellers matter more than your bestsellers

Everyone gets excited about bestsellers. Nobody wants to deal with products that aren’t shifting.

Dead stock blocks cash flow, triggers damaging discounts, and prevents investment in items with real demand.

If you’ve got a missed sale because something sold out? Frustrating, but that money’s gone and the problem is over. If you’ve got stock piling up?

That’s money tied up that you can’t spend elsewhere, and it’s getting worse every day you ignore it.

The mathematics are unforgiving: £50,000 tied up in slow-moving inventory is £50,000 unavailable for the fast-moving, profitable lines. This isn’t just dead money; it’s an opportunity cost that compounds every day.

Ignoring problem stock only increases loss over time; it never self-corrects.

What looking at data actually means

Businesses often review data but rarely act on clear signals.

Anna’s key questions for your data:

• Where are the exceptions? (Outliers tell you more than averages)
• What’s the rate of sale? (Are products selling as fast as you expected?)
• How long will the current stock last at current rates?
• What’s building up that shouldn’t be?

If your systems delay insights, your decisions lag. Infrastructure for rapid response is as vital as the decisions themselves.

One thing you can actually do

Anna’s direct recommendation: check your worst sellers now. Identify stagnant inventory immediately.

Don’t schedule a meeting about it. Don’t wait until next week’s review. Don’t add it to the quarterly planning cycle. Take action today.

Be ruthless. Unsold products drain your business. Aggressive markdowns are preferable to letting inventory age and restricting cash flow.

Chasing bestsellers is exciting. Dealing with dead stock is boring and frustrating. But fixing your worst sellers will improve your business faster than anything else you do this week.

Bestsellers thrive with little support. Failures demand attention—or losses deepen.

This article was written with the assistance of AI.