Middling Items

Winners are obviously important, but your middling items ... those performing "in the middle" of your assortment, well, they are important as well.

I looked at items in the middle from five years ago, measuring the fraction of items that were future winners.

• Year 4 = 3%.
  
• Year 3 = 3%.
• Year 2 = 6%.
• Year 1 = 5%.

Not many advance to winning status. That's the challenge many of us face. It is hard, darn hard, to identify items that have the potential to be best sellers. As a consequence, we need many new items each year. With more new items, we have a good chance of having some that become winning items.

Too often, I work on projects where new item development was cut in half ... "we've got to squeeze more juice from the lemon." That works until all of the juice has been squeezed from the lemon. 

Then you need a new lemon!