How do I stop drowning in dead and slow-moving SKUs?
The short answer
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.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time. India-specific ones carry a badge.
4 resources2 India-specific3 link-checked
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📄 Article
✓ Link checkedFreeIntermediate
Why we picked it
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.
Why we picked it
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.
Why we picked it
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.
Why we picked it
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.
