How do you decide what to reorder? When is slow actually slow, and when is it just the wrong month? And how long do you give a product you love before you admit it is not working?
This is the question that arrives once you have more than a couple of products, and nobody prepares you for it, because all the advice online is about launching. Almost nothing is about the boring middle, where a line already exists and you have to keep choosing.
I have more than a hundred and sixty SKUs now, and I am going to walk you through how I actually decide, including the parts that are not a formula.
Here is the fear underneath the question, and I want to name it because it changes what you do: deciding to retire a product feels like admitting the product failed, and by extension, that you were wrong to make it. So people hold on. They reorder things out of loyalty to a past version of themselves, and the money that should have gone into the thing that is working sits on a shelf instead.
Let us break this down.
The signals I actually watch
Not a dashboard. Four things, in this order.
One. Sell-through rate, not units sold. How much of what I ordered has gone, over how long. A product that sold two hundred units from an order of two thousand is in more trouble than one that sold eighty from an order of a hundred. Raw unit counts flatter the things you over-ordered.
Two. Whether it sells in more than one channel. If something moves at wholesale but not online, or at one show but nowhere else, that is not a dead product. That is a product with one audience, and it tells me how much to order rather than whether to reorder.
Three. Reorder behavior from stockists. A shop reordering a product is the strongest signal I get, and it is worth more than the number attached to it. A shop buying something twice has sold it to real people and chosen to bet again.
Four. What it does to the rest of the line. Some products earn their place by making everything else make sense. A color that ties a collection together, an entry-price item that gets someone to try you. I keep things that do that even when they are unremarkable on their own.
The thresholds, and why they are not rules
Here is roughly where my lines sit.
If a product has not cleared about half its run within a full year, including one holiday season, I stop and look hard. If it has not cleared about half in two seasons of the right kind, it is usually done.
If a product is between those and still gets reordered by shops, I will run it again, smaller.
I want to be honest about what those numbers are. They are not a formula I derived. They are where my experience has landed after enough rounds of guessing, and they move by product type. Something seasonal gets more patience. Something that sits at the register and should turn constantly gets less.
The gut-call exceptions
There are two, and they are real.
A product that has not had a fair run. If it launched at the wrong time of year, or it was buried on the site, or the photography was bad, it has not been tested. It has been ignored. That is a marketing problem, not a product problem, and retiring it means you never found out.
A product that is doing quiet work. Sometimes the thing that barely moves is the thing people mention when they find you. It is not paying for itself in units. It is paying for itself somewhere less countable, and I have kept a few of those on purpose.
The rule I try to hold myself to: I am allowed exceptions, but I have to say out loud what the exception is for. "I like it" is not a reason. "It is the only piece in this colorway and the collection looks thin without it" is.
What retiring actually looks like
It is not dramatic. You let the stock run out, you mark it final while it lasts, and you tell people, because a product going away is one of the few honest reasons to email a list.
Then you leave the design alone for a while. Retiring a product is not deleting it. Several things I have retired came back later on a different substrate, or in a different colorway, for a different season.
I started out thinking that greeting cards would be the bread and butter, I quickly realized that I didn’t have the production capacity to keep up with the release schedule in the greeting card industry- letting this whole category felt like relief!
In hindsight, I probably should have thought more about what I brought into my line and if it made sense. There is a real jump from washi tape to oven mitt… I have never seen anyone use washi with an oven mitt, so the marketing is tricky. But, I still loved oven mitts and I wanted them in the line. They did complement tea towels in both design and category, so I have kept them so that tea towels don’t stand alone in a sea of paper.
The reframe
After years of making products, this is the part that tends to get skipped in the advice: a product line is not a monument. It is a working set. Things enter it, earn their place for a while, and leave.
The first time I retired something I had been proud of, it felt like a verdict on me. It was not. It was information, arriving late, about what a specific group of people wanted to buy in a specific year. The thing that made it hurt was that I had been treating the decision as permanent in both directions, as though making a product was a promise and stopping was breaking it.
It is not a promise. It is a run. You get to run it again, differently, or not at all.
One thing at a time. You got this.
If you are sitting on a line you cannot read clearly, that is a good hour to spend together. In a 1-on-1 call we go through what you actually have, what the numbers are telling you, and what the next order should be. You leave with a recording and a concrete checklist, so the decision does not have to live in your head anymore. Book a 1-on-1 call.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should I give a new product before deciding it is not working?
Give it at least one full cycle of its natural season, and make sure it has had a real chance to be seen. A product that launched at the wrong time or was never photographed well has not been tested yet, it has been ignored.
What is a good sell-through rate for a small product business?
There is no universal number, and anyone giving you one is guessing at your business. Watch the proportion of your own run that moves over a defined period, and compare products against each other rather than against an industry figure.
Should I reorder a product that only sells wholesale?
Often yes, at a smaller quantity. A product that moves in one channel is not a dead product, it is a product with one audience. That tells you how much to order rather than whether to order.
Is retiring a product a failure?
No. A product line is a working set, not a monument. Retiring something is information about what a group of people wanted in a specific year, and the design can come back later in a different form.
How do I tell customers a product is going away?
Plainly, while stock lasts. A product being discontinued is one of the few genuinely honest reasons to email your list, and it usually moves the remaining inventory.