Creating an online company swag store is brilliant if you’re looking to boost employee engagement, increase brand awareness, and drive more sales with promotional products. Outfitting your team with custom-branded apparel, drinkware, tech accessories, and more can pay dividends when connecting with customers and talent.
However, effective inventory management is the key to maximizing your investment in company branding swag. When your branded merchandise inventory falls out of stock or fails to meet the demands, you lose out on those benefits while frustrating customers. In this blog, we’ll discuss a few best practices for inventory management. Follow these to keep your online company swag store stocked, streamlined, and selling.
Set Accurate Reorder Points
The foundation of solid inventory management is having accurate reorder points set for each product you sell in your online company swag store. Setting reorder points too high results in overstock, while setting them too low leads to unexpected outages.
When calculating ideal reorder points, consider historical order data, sales forecasts, average lead times, and seasonal spikes and dips in demand. To avoid stockouts, build a buffer of about 10-20% extra on top of projected demand. Revisit and adjust the reorder points quarterly or semi-annually.
Implement Inventory Tracking Software
It is virtually impossible to manually monitor inventory counts and reorder points across an extensive product catalog. That’s why investing in inventory tracking software is so essential for company stores for promotional products.
A robust swag store inventory software gives you real-time visibility into existing stock levels across all your products and automatically generates purchase orders when reorder points are reached. This eliminates the guesswork and ensures you order more stock at precisely the right time.
Streamline Ordering Processes
Disorganization on the ordering side can thwart even the most carefully set reorder points, leading to errors and delays that cause inventory shortfalls. Document detailed replenishment procedures, including ideal order frequencies, lead times for each product/supplier, and protocols for rush orders.
Centralize ordering rather than having multiple people place orders. Set calendar reminders for when purchase orders should be placed to align with reorder points. Standardizing and streamlining ordering this way improves accuracy and timeliness.
Build in Flexibility
Despite the most precise calculations and streamlined processes, fluctuations in supply and demand can still catch you off guard. Supply chain hiccups, unexpected sales spikes, and product defects can all interfere with keeping stock levels aligned with reorder points.
Build flexibility to handle such scenarios with occasional safety stock for your fastest-selling essential products. This buffer inventory beyond normal stock levels means you can handle more significant than expected demand without stockouts.
Analyze Metrics
Inventory management should be an ongoing optimization effort, not a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. Examine reorder point accuracy, turnover rates, and other inventory metrics monthly or quarterly.
Identify the products where your stock levels consistently miss projected demand by a wide margin so you can adjust reorder points accordingly. Keep a close eye on dead stock lingering in your warehouse, tying up capital so you can liquidate or discount those items. This number crunching ensures your inventory management strategy remains nimble and calibrated to your business’s needs.
Choose Flywheel for all your Branding Needs
Maintaining optimized inventory for your online company swag store takes knowledge, experience, and advanced operational capabilities. The inventory management experts at Flywheel Brand will help you handle the entire stock management process behind the scenes—no more stock headaches and shortages. We ensure your online store stays perpetually stocked with all the custom-branded apparel, drinkware, and swag your workforce and customers want to order.
