As a retailer, the products you choose to stock quite literally shape your store’s identity, profitability, and customer appeal. Curating an intelligent, high-performing product assortment is both an art and a science.
Get it right by aligning your merchandise with shopper demands and your brand positioning, and you cultivate a loyal following while earning healthy margins. But get it wrong by missing the mark on relevant selections, and you will quickly go broke as inventory gathers dust.
Identify Underserved Customer Needs
One of the best ways to uncover promising product opportunities is analyzing where your current market has unmet customer needs and pain points. Maybe shoppers are craving more stylish, high-quality options than what’s available. Or more affordable alternatives to overpriced goods from leading brands.
For example, bulk designer sunglasses in varied styles and colors could satisfy demand for aspirational, premium accessories at reasonable costs. The people at wholesale sunglasses distributor Olympic Eyewear recommend looking for opportunities to over-deliver value compared to the competition.
Align With Your Brand Identity
While chasing hot product trends and opening new frontiers is enticing, you cannot completely abandon your brand’s established identity either. There’s power in the associations customers already have firmly planted in their minds about your store and its proposition.
Any new categories should harmonize with your existing assortments and positioning, not detract or distract from what you’re already known for. Look for smart adjacencies and sensible category extensions that allow you to leverage the brand equity you have built over time.
For example, a chic apparel boutique might struggle abruptly carrying industrial tools; there’s a mismatch between the aesthetics and customer expectations. But expanding into complementary accessories like jewelry, sunglasses or handbags would feel more natural for the fashion shopper.
Source Responsibly and Strategically
As you vet potential product winners to bring into your retail lineup, carefully assess the full supply chain realities for procurement, inventory management, and merchandizing. You’ll need partners able to reliably deliver quality goods in line with your anticipated demand volumes.
Take the time to research reputable vendors and distributors thoroughly, so you have contingency sourcing options available. Smart diversification across multiple suppliers for key categories helps mitigate stock-out risks. And get clear on all certification, compliance, and safety requirements.
Phase in New Products Gradually
Even with the most educated and thorough decision-making process, there’s always inherent risk in staking your business on completely overhauling your product assortment abruptly. Major innovations and deviations deserve extra precaution before going all-in.
Adopt a crawl-walk-run methodology instead of hasty transformations. Evaluate challenging initial launches with tightly curated capsule collections or limited distribution channels first before graduating to larger commitments and investments.
Keep Optimizing and Course-Correcting
Your product strategy can never become complacent and stagnant. Routinely audit, analyze, and optimize your assortment’s mix to proactively address evolving shopping behaviors and competitive landscapes.
What’s hot today could fizzle out next season. Customer demographics and preferences continually shift. Updated merchandizing technologies provide new capabilities. Keep your selection fresh through an intentional new product pipeline with strict criteria backstopped by data.
Conclusion
Crafting the perfect product assortment to captivate customers requires relentless commitment to researching market opportunities thoroughly, aligning with brand identity, sourcing intelligently, validated testing, and routinely optimizing. There are no shortcuts; it’s rolling up your sleeves to scrutinize audience needs, competition realities, pricing dynamics and merchandizing logistics.
But nail that rigorous upfront strategy for choosing what products to stock and you’ll propel your retail business’s growth, loyalty and margins for the long haul. A clearly differentiated, relevant merchandise selection tailored to real customer desires is simply too powerful of a weapon to underutilize or get wrong.