How much retail product to stock on opening day without eating the rest of my build out money

Keisha Brown· Opening a four-chair natural hair salon; lease signed, build-out underway· Registered, Beauty & Personal Care·Jul 11

The distributors have found me. I have three reps who all want to be my opening order and all of them have minimums, and the friendliest one wants about $3,800 to get the pricing tier that makes the margin worth having.

I have a retail wall that is maybe eight feet of shelf and a build out budget that is already over. So the question is not which lines I love, it is how much inventory I can afford to have sitting still.

Where my head is right now:

two retail lines, not six, so clients can actually choose rather than freeze
back bar stocked properly, because running out mid service is unforgivable
everything else ordered when someone asks for it twice

The other piece I only learned last month is that in my state I charge sales tax on the product but not on the service, which means my register has to be set up correctly on day one and my filing is now a monthly thing on the calendar. Your state will do this differently, mine is apparently not the fun one.

I put my real numbers into the cost estimator and inventory was the line I had most wildly underguessed.

What did you open with, and what was still sitting on the shelf six months later?

4 replies

Nina Park· Idea stage·Jul 11

I sell exactly two things, a cleanser and a little brush, and even that tiny amount of retail taught me that clients buy what you physically hand them at the end of the appointment. The shelf does nothing. The handing does everything.

So two lines sounds right, and I would go further and pick the four items you are personally willing to recommend out loud every single day. Whatever you are not comfortable selling will still be there at Christmas, looking at you.

Also jealous of eight feet of shelf. I have a basket.

Keisha Brown· Registered·Jul 12

Four items I will say out loud every day is a much better filter than the one I was using, which was roughly which rep did I like most on the phone.

I am going to open with two lines and four hero products, plus back bar sizes, and tell the third rep no for now in a way that leaves the door open. It also means the opening order lands closer to $1,900, which is the difference between being tight in month one and being genuinely stuck.

Lena Kaminski· Open·Jul 12

I carry shampoo and a detangler in the van and the lesson I got the expensive way is that inventory is money you cannot use. My first order was three hundred dollars of a conditioner I loved and clients did not, and it rode around in that van for five months like a passenger.

One thing that helped once I got tired of guessing: I only reorder something when the second to last one sells, and I write the date on the bottom of every bottle when it arrives. If the date is older than ninety days I stop buying it, regardless of how much I personally like it.

Nina Park· Idea stage·Jul 13

Writing the date on the bottom is so simple that I am annoyed I have not been doing it. My basket has a serum in it that I am fairly sure predates my current chair rental.

Keisha, if you do the date thing from day one you will have real sell through numbers by the time the reps come back in the spring wanting a bigger order, and you can negotiate off your own data instead of their enthusiasm. That feels like the actual difference between a retail wall that pays rent and one that just looks nice in photos.

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