Track Clothing Inventory: The U.S. is home to well over 150,000 clothing boutiques. With Americans buying more clothes than ever before right now, it’s a great time to be the owner of one of these boutiques.
If you recently opened up your clothing store, you’re probably enjoying the process of picking out clothes to sell to your customers. It can be a lot of fun trying to figure out which clothing items people will want to buy from you.
But in addition to purchasing clothing for your customers, you’re also going to have to learn how to track clothing inventory. If you don’t keep tabs on your clothing inventory, it’s going to make it almost impossible for you to run a successful boutique.
Today, we’re going to set you up with some advice that will help you track clothing inventory at all times. These clothing tracking inventory tips will work wonders for your operation and should help you become more profitable than you would be otherwise.
Take a look at our tips on tracking clothing inventory below.
Create a System for Accepting New Track Clothing Inventory
When you have new inventory come into your boutique, you might be tempted to let it pile up in the back until you’re able to get to it. You should try not to get into the habit of doing this.
Instead, you should create a system that will make it easy for you to accept new inventory and begin to monitor it right away. Otherwise, you run the risk of having inventory get misplaced in the back or, worse, stolen by rogue employees.
Within just a few hours of having new inventory enter your boutique, it should be all checked in and ready to sell. The sooner you can officially accept it into your shop, the quicker you’ll be able to sell it and turn a profit.
Come Up With a Way to Keep Inventory Organized
Once you’ve accepted new inventory into your boutique, you should have a place where you can put it for storage purposes. Ideally, you’ll want to create space in the back where you can keep all your inventory that isn’t out for sale yet.
By taking this approach to dealing with your inventory, you’ll make it easy to replenish clothes after they start to sell. You’ll also be able to quickly and easily take inventory of what you have in the back.
By organizing your boutique’s clothing, you’ll feel less stressed out by all the inventory that you have. You’ll be able to take a step back and see what you have in stock in no time at all.
Use Technology to Keep Tabs on Inventory
Once upon a time, most clothing boutique owners had to keep up with their inventory by using paper and pencil. But nowadays, there is no longer a reason for them to do this.
There is so much technology that you can utilize to keep tabs on your inventory. This barcode scanner app is a great example of this.
When you download this app, you’ll be able to scan the barcodes that you put on your boutique’s clothing while you’re taking inventory. It’ll be so much simpler than using paper and pencil all the time.
Perform Manual Track Clothing Inventory Audits regularly
Taking inventory is going to be one of the most tedious jobs that you do when you own a clothing boutique. But guess what? It’s also going to be one of the most important tasks that you’ll have to tackle!
Every month or two, you should set aside some time to go through all your inventory to manually see what you have. It’ll give you a much better idea of what you need to reorder, what isn’t selling as well as you might have hoped, and what has gone missing for one reason or another.
Performing manual inventory audits will also familiarize you with all the clothing that you have in your boutique and help you figure out what you might want to discount so that you can get rid of it faster.
Track Sales to Stay Up to Date on Inventory
As the owner of a clothing boutique, your main goal is obviously to sell as many clothes as you possibly can. It’ll be the only way for your boutique to make a profit and keep its doors open.
You might get so excited when you make sales, though, that you might not always track your sales as closely as you should. It could result in you running out of particular products that are selling well for you and missing out on the opportunity to sell more of them.
With this in mind, you should set up a computerized system for tracking your sales and cross-reference it with your inventory to see what you are running low on.
Check Up on Which Inventory Is Selling the Most
There is something called the 80/20 rule that is used early and often in the business world. Simply put, it suggests that about 80% of your company’s profits are going to come from just 20% of its products.
As the owner of a clothing boutique, it’s going to be up to you to figure out which 20% of your products are bringing in the majority of your profits. The quicker you can find out what this 20% consists of, the sooner you can ramp up your efforts to sell more of these products.
The only surefire way to do this will be by keeping up with your inventory checks and looking at which products are selling the most for you. When you do this, it’ll shine a light on which products you should be focusing more of your efforts on.
Handle Reordering Items for Your Inventory on Your Own
Some of your suppliers are going to tell you that they would be more than happy to replenish your inventory when they notice it’s running low. This might seem like a nice enough gesture on their part, but most suppliers will be doing this for their selfish reasons.
Just like you, suppliers are in the business of making as much money as they can. So it’s going to work to their benefit when they handle reordering items for your inventory.
You should tell these suppliers, “Thanks, but no thanks!”, and take care of reordering inventory by yourself. Although it’ll create a little bit more work for you in the long run, it’ll also ensure that you’re keeping a watchful eye on your inventory and only accepting items with proven track records.
Learn About New Techniques on Track Clothing Inventory
Today’s clothing boutiques don’t take inventory as clothing boutiques did back in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, or even 2010s. They’ve updated their processes on how to track clothing inventory.
And this trend is going to continue well into the future. Clothing boutiques are always coming up with new and innovative ways to take inventory of their products.
As a result, you’re going to need to read up on the best ways to track clothing inventory and update your process for accepting inventory and keeping tabs on it. You don’t want to get stuck using an old method to track inventory and ultimately pay the price for it.
You should subscribe to as many business journals as you can and skim through business-related blogs like this one in your free time. They’ll shed some light on which techniques you should be using when it comes to your inventory.
You can take these techniques and apply them to your clothing boutique so that you don’t ever fall behind. They’ll help you make the most of all the effort that you’re going to be putting in when it comes to monitoring your boutique’s inventory day in and day out.
Make Clothing Tracking Inventory a Top Priority at Your Boutique
Figuring out how to track clothing inventory isn’t going to be one of the most glamorous parts of your job when you own a clothing boutique. But if you don’t do it, you might not have a clothing boutique for very long.
Use the clothing inventory tracking tips found here to make sure you know all about the inventory you keep in your shop. It’ll help you run a more efficient business and keep your profits trending in the right direction.
Do you want to get some more business tips and tricks that will help make your boutique a success? Find them in our other blog articles.