May 22, 2022

Post-COVID New Item Failure

Last week I reintroduced the concept of Winners/Contenders/Others.

One sign of a brilliant merchandising team is their ability to find new products that customers love. For the company I analyzed last week, here are the number of new items that became Winners that year.

  • 18 three years ago, 19 two years ago, 13 one year ago, 7 in the past year.
Yup, that's not a successful Merchandising Team, now it is?

An awful lot of you are going to dig into your data and realize that your product/merchandising teams missed some of the fundamentals they acquired prior to the COVID-bump. They stopped tracking success of new items, heck, they had a hard time even FINDING new items so they just plain struggled and now here we are, with constant stories of new product issues.

If new merchandise is < 20% of your annual sales total, you probably don't need to be as thorough on this topic as I'm encouraging readers to be.

But if new merchandise is > 20% of your annual sales total and you have results like we see above, you didn't get the job done. It's time to re-emphasize new merchandise.

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