Optimizing Your Inventory

One of the biggest hurdles when I first started off was not having enough sneakers to sell.  Fast forward a few years to today, I now find myself with TOO MUCH inventory in which I find myself struggling to keep track of what I need to sell. Being able to experience both spectrum from a seller standpoint there are definitely pros and cons of both.  Of course having too much inventory usually can be a good problem to have, but at the same time it can be a double edge sword at times.

Depending on how you have set up your resell business in terms of man power, knowing what to buy and how much to buy is really a true art.  If you have an army of co-owners or partners that’s willing to put in work together, being able to dab into different pairs and having a diverse inventory shouldn’t be a problem and could be a good thing.  However, if you’re like a one man team like me that has to run everything from top to bottom, narrowing what you buy and being strategic about it goes a long way to optimize your business.  At the end of the day, not having enough to sell is a problem, but being overwhelmed to a point you can’t keep up with your own inventory can also be a a bigger problem.

Since I never had an army of people to help me with me on the business, I’m unable to speak on that experience, but speaking from personal experience of running everything myself I can give you a few pointers that works for me.  Over the past 2 years I have really just concentrated on a couple dozen of models only, but for each model I tend to go HAM on the quantity.  They say don’t put all your eggs in one basket and diversify…in the world of equities/stocks that may be true, but in the world of sneakers it is a little different.  I’ve been in the industry long enough that I know almost with certainty which pairs will do well in the long term and the price movement on pairs are generally very predictable over time.  Why I decide to go hard on certain models in numbers is because TIME is my biggest limitation.  I don’t have time to keep track of hundreds and thousands of different pairs because not only would I need to keep track of inventory placement, but monitoring prices for hundreds of different pairs is extremely difficult.  Try tracking the market price for 100 pairs of sneakers on a weekly basis…you WILL GO NUTS and you will waste a lot of time!

For example, over the years I went very hard on Travis 4s…at the end of the 1st month of release, I bought over 100 pairs.  I didn’t sell any pairs at first because they didn’t shoot up right away.  However, keeping track of when is a favourable time to sell was relatively easy over time.  Pairs started to really jump in price in 2019 and that’s when I can monitor StockX on a daily basis and just look at what size and what price was favourable to sell.  With 100 pairs, being able to manage only a dozen different sizes of the same model is MUCH EASIER than managing 100 pairs of the same size of different models.  Don’t believe me?…go try it yourself.

What I learned over the years is that favourable selling prices usually comes in waves. There are times where the price is extremely favourable and there are times where it might be better to hold a bit longer.  As a seller, you may want to sell when it’s favourable, but one of the biggest problem for sellers is acknowledging when that favourable time is.  ie. Travis 4s when they were at $800-$900…I was like hmmm that’s kind of good price to unload some pairs, but you’re asking yourself can it keep going up?  In hindsight, that would have been a great time to unload all my pairs because a few months later they dropped to $650.

I could go on for days about inventory and the struggles I have had over the years, but I will keep it short for today! 🙂