Switching POS mid season because I could not tell which racks were actually paying rent
For two years of pop ups I ran on a phone card reader and a notebook, and that was fine when everything fit in a van. In a store with about nine hundred items it stopped being fine in roughly week three.
The vintage problem is that every single item is its own product. One jacket, one price, one tag, and when it sells it is gone forever. So the usual retail reporting, which wants to tell me how many units of a thing I sold, has nothing to say to me. I need to know which rack earned, not which SKU.
What I did was move onto a proper POS in August and tag everything by rack and decade rather than by garment. Two weeks of evenings with a tagging gun and a podcast. Now I can see that the seventies rack turns over in about eleven days and the formalwear rack has items that have been hanging since June, which I already suspected and had been emotionally overruling.
The buying lesson came from an estate lot I paid $900 for in May, of which I have sold maybe half. I am moving more toward consignment at a sixty forty split so the risk sits with the closet it came from.
What do you look at weekly? I do not want a dashboard, I want the two numbers that stop me buying badly.