Baby Flower Crown Headbands

Why does being sold out make me so happy?

We're sold out of the Coral flower Crown Headbands as of today. It's not the revenue generated from the sales that is making me utterly giddy.

I should be a tad worried that I cannot fill demand for the flower crowns in Coral this spring and summer, shouldn't I?  We sold out of this hot style and colour before March even hit and I won't be restocking it.  You are probably scratching your head with this, as that doesn't make sense...or so it seems.  They are so popular, you sold out!! Why wouldn't you re-stock it? Make more and ride the wave, you're chiding me as my friend in business.  As my customer, your demand should be driving me to get more in stock...and NOW, right? But, I've made this mistake before. Too many times, in fact.  The times have changed so much since Baby Wisp® first started (2008) , you wouldn't believe how much faster the 'trend' cycles are. You think a bow is a bow is a bow...pink is pink and pink.  I tell you - it's not true. [caption id="attachment_1258" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Coral Baby Wisp Flower Crown[/caption] Any retailer can tell you about this problem of inventory and trend cycle.  Just go to any "end of season" sale and you will see prices that you cannot believe. You know for sure. that skirt you just bought for 99 cents, definitely cost several times that to make. But here's the thing - If you don't sell it off at the end of the season, you will never see a dime for it.  Knowing you have such a short window to get your style noticed you have to be already on to the next before you're finished with the first! Styles are so fluid, so hard to nail down.  As a designer, you're gambling on the right colour, the size, shape, style, fabric and more often that not - you're either doomed or crowned queen when a 'CELEBRITY' tells the general public what's cool and what's not cool or the celebrity BABY is photographed wearing a certain style.  You can't plan for that the year before when your designs are in production.  It's such crazy concoction of the right ingredients whether your design will be loved.  And when it's loved, it's loved for like a second.  It used to be a minute or two but now it's a second!   So today, I'm celebrating the second of fame we got in our Baby Wisp Kingdom.   Our coral flower crown is loved.  We got it right! Nailed it! woohooo!!!  That's a "good day" at work when you feel your decisions were right. On that note - there are only a handful of aqua left as that will be next to sell out...so hurry before they are gone for good! Click here to shop at our store>>>  

Yes, I recently finished reading the book, "50 Shades of Grey" and um, well I only read it because it was on our book club list and I want those hours of my life back.  ;)...but my  blog post has nothing to do with the book, it has to do with business reasons to limit your colour offerings of products.  

In the case of Baby Wisp, we are able to offer a large variety of shades of Pink, but not very many of blue or special colours like this season's hot tangerine trend.  Why?

This post is inspired by the 5 or so emails I received in June for special request colours to be offered in our products.   I thought it might be a good opportunity to share a business lesson I learned the hard way.  This, of course, is in my humble opinion only based only on my personal business experience so take it or leave it (for those who are interested in this blog for the business advice I share).

Running a girl's accessory company, I can tell you that Baby Wisp sells more pink than all other colours combined.  How is this possible?  First, consider that we offer at least 3 different pinks in each collection. We have close to 30 collections which means we stock more pink than any other colour.

Take, for example, our polka dot mini latch clip 5 pack.  3 pink variations of polka dot ribbon at the top while our other polka dot pack is more mixed with only 2 pinks.  We sell more of the pink packs 3:1.  I could illustrate this across many of our offerings.

From a customer perspective, you can easily see the logic for the purchasing of pink over other colours.  The majority of a girl's wardrobe in Canadian  society is pink (yes, gross generalization and no stats backing that claim up- opinion piece here people!) so it would make sense that when accessorizing, you would purchase accessories that would get the most use possible out of them.  Especially, for high end, high quality boutique accessories, it just makes sense to optimize your investment.  For gifting purchases, you are pretty much guaranteed that buying her a pink hair bow is going to match something in her wardrobe.

From a Business perspective, consider the cost of stocking say...ORANGE.  We sold approximately 10 last year online.  Selling ten bows in a year could not sustain our business.

It's the only orange product we carry so it's not that it's in competition with other styles.  It's the colour itself that is limiting it's sales.  We did sell ten though, so there are customers who want it...but to take up expensive inventory space and divert cash away from investing in other stronger selling products that move at 100 or 500X faster rate; it does not make much sense.

Being a specialty boutique does mean we offer unique products, styles, and colours so we do try and offer grey, yellow, navy, orange and green but the balance we strike is that those colours are very, very restricted and cannot be offered across all collections due to warehouse space and cash reasons.

We take very seriously the feedback of our customers in our growth strategy so with enough emails, phonecalls, tweets and facebook messages from our retail and wholesale customers we continue to expand to new styles and colours each season.  Trend-setting based on customer driven styles.  Speaking of, what type of new products or styles would you like to see Baby Wisp carry?  Join the facebook conversation or comment here.