Sales Video

How to Prepare for Slow Selling Seasons

How to Prepare for Slow Selling Seasons

Don’t worry, slow selling seasons are completely normal realities of retail! Here’s how you can use them to your benefit…

Don’t worry, slow selling seasons are completely normal realities of retail! Here’s how you can use them to your benefit.

A slow selling period can really happen at almost any time of the year, but historically slow selling periods are between the months of January and February, and in July and August. When you start thinking about preparing your selling cycles, you look at your overall timeline. If your product is a Resort product, and if your product follows the traditional spring to summer period, or the entire winter cadence, your slow selling periods might be different.

First, when identifying a slow period, think about the seasonality of your product. When do you actually anticipate having the highest amounts of sales? Then plan your activities, your marketing activities and your business activities accordingly. You don’t want to be working on a big marketing push, or a big marketing campaign when it’s the time of year to launch your wholesale trade show. You need to be sure that you’re preparing for busy seasons all throughout the year.

Once you’ve identified the slow periods, think about your yearly activities. Your business involves marketing strategies, digital campaigns, pop-up events, sample sales, or a special friends and family sale. Think about organizing all of the sales and marketing activities for the year. You’re either working on them or executing them during traditional slow selling periods.

Again, those selling periods for most people are January and February, but if you happen to be a winter company and you’re selling a lot of great winter coats, January and February might be amazing sessions for you. You might be looking at slower periods towards June, July and August. Take a look at your business model and plan accordingly. Being a small business owner means you need to be very careful about your time. Those four months out of the year, potentially more, potentially less, that are considered slow can actually be blessings in disguise to help you regroup, reposition and make sure that your business is actually able to take advantage of the busy selling periods.

Here is a final word of caution. Being in a retail industry means your product, unless it’s a replenishment item like pencils, leggings, undergarments, or socks even, will have cycles with peaks and lows. You’re going to have to plan for those; it’s totally normal. Your long term strategy will always incorporate slow selling periods and you probably will never have a year-over-year sales balance where you’re just continuously seeing the same increment from sales.

If you have questions about how to manage your markdowns, how to manage pop-up shops or any other marketing activities, send us an email hello@scalingretail.com.