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Operations, shipping & CX

How do I stop drowning in dead and slow-moving SKUs?

Dead stock is a cash problem wearing an inventory costume, every rupee sitting in a slow SKU is a rupee you can't spend on your next winning product. Run an ABC analysis quarterly: your top 20% of SKUs by revenue get tight reorder discipline, the bottom tier gets discounted, bundled, or liquidated within 90 days of going stale, no sentimental attachment. The rule that actually works is deciding your dead-stock trigger, say, 'no sale in 60 days = liquidate', before you're emotionally attached to the SKU, not after.

Go deeper

4 resources, 2 India-specific, 3 link-checked.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Directly tackles the founder's real tension, stock enough to never disappoint a customer, but not so much you choke your cash, with concrete reorder-logic guidance rather than abstract principles.

Inventory Management for D2C Brands: Balance Stock & Cash

From Ceendesis Blog by Ceendesis

  • Excess stock and stockouts are two sides of the same forecasting failure
  • Reorder logic should reduce risk without silently ballooning stock levels
  • Cash tied up in inventory is a founder-level metric, not just an ops metric
Open ceendesis.com
📄 Article
✓ Link checked India Free Intermediate

A concrete before/after case study, 60,000 sq ft warehouse, sub-48-hour fulfillment, 99.99% bin-level accuracy, that shows what disciplined inventory infrastructure actually buys a scaling Indian fashion D2C brand.

The Indian Garage Co.: Scaling New Heights in D2C Fashion with Increff

From Increff Case Studies by Increff

  • Bin-level accuracy near 99.99% is achievable with the right WMS discipline
  • Sub-48-hour fulfillment is realistic once inventory data is trustworthy
  • Scaling SKU count without stock control breaks reconciliation first
Open increff.com
📖 Book
✓ Link checked Paid Intermediate

Not an inventory book on the surface, but the Theory of Constraints it teaches, find the bottleneck, don't optimize anything else until you fix it, is exactly the discipline that stops founders from micromanaging the wrong SKUs while their hero product stocks out.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

From Goodreads by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

  • System performance is capped by its single biggest constraint, not the average
  • Optimizing a non-constraint step is wasted effort, sometimes actively harmful
  • Reframes 'reduce inventory' as one lever among throughput and operating expense
Open goodreads.com
📄 Article
India Free Beginner

A mistakes-first framing is more useful early on than another best-practices list, it's faster to check yourself against a list of known failure modes than to reverse-engineer them yourself.

10 Inventory Management Mistakes Small Businesses Make in India

From Unicommerce Blog by Unicommerce

  • Manual, spreadsheet-only tracking is the single most common root cause
  • Poor demand forecasting compounds into both stockouts and dead stock
  • No formal reorder-point discipline is a recurring small-business gap
Open unicommerce.com

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