Retiring SKUs on a schedule instead of discovering dead stock

Every accessory in this catalog has an expiry date set by somebody else: when a device generation stops being carried, demand for everything made for it falls off within two quarters and never returns. The brand knew this in principle and behaved as if each SKU would sell forever.

The result was a catalog where 41% of inventory value sat in products for devices three and four generations old, still carrying advertising budget out of habit, still accruing long-term storage fees, and eventually written off in one painful line at year end. The cash locked in that stock was the same cash the brand kept saying it did not have for new launches.

We made the decline predictable and acted on it early, while the stock still had value.

• Every SKU tagged with the device generation it serves, which converts a catalog into a set of cohorts with known ages.
• A four-stage ladder — grow, hold, taper, exit — with the stage set by generation age and sell-through rate rather than by opinion.
• Advertising withdrawn at the taper stage instead of at the exit stage, since paying for clicks on a dying SKU is the most expensive way to hold inventory.
• Planned markdowns at exit, timed twelve to sixteen weeks before the point where the stock historically became unsellable.

The annual write-off fell from $340k to $61k, and the share of inventory sitting in SKUs older than two years went from 41% to 9%.

Revenue grew 39% because the cash that used to die in old stock bought depth in current-generation products, which sell. The markdowns themselves were not clever — selling at 62% of list is nobody's ambition — but they recover roughly two thirds of the value that the previous approach recovered none of, and they do it a year earlier.