Replacing Gut-Feel Reordering With a Three-Point Review

Novelty products have a sales curve that punishes anyone reading a single week of data. A new design spikes, settles, then either holds a modest trickle or dies. Reordering on the spike gives you dead stock; ignoring the settle gives you stockouts on the one design that turned out to be reliable.

The three review points

A rhythm I have found more reliable than any forecast:

• Week 1 — novelty. Note the number but do not act on it. This is curiosity, not demand.
• Week 4 — settle. Look for repeat purchase. This is the earliest honest signal.
• Week 8 — trend. Decide depth and whether the design earns a permanent slot.

The useful metric at week four is not units sold, it is units sold to customers who already bought something. A design bought once by many people is a novelty. A design bought twice by a few people is a line.

Keeping the range short

Most ranges do not need fifty live designs. They need fifteen that sell and a rotating tail for novelty. When reordering, hold the proven shapes steady and rotate only the tail. A shelf that returning customers recognise is worth more than a wide shelf they cannot navigate.

Planning backwards from the shelf date

Lead time runs backwards: production window, inland leg, chosen freight mode, customs, receiving, then a buffer for the reorder itself. The second order is rarely as smooth as the first, and planning it as if it were is the most common scheduling error I see.

The check people skip

Before a reorder, confirm the designs are still in the current range and that the packing has not changed. A silent packing substitution is more disruptive than a price rise: it changes shelf appearance and carton count simultaneously, and both of those break assumptions your landed cost was built on.

The pre-order questions that cover this are on the sourcing checklist, and the current range by family is in the product catalogue so you can verify a design is still live before committing.

One more habit: write down why you dropped a design. Six months later that note is the only thing preventing you from reordering the same mistake.

---

Written by Zhao Jin, sales at Yiwu Jinji Trading Company (King Squishy), a Yiwu-based supplier of wholesale squishy and fidget toys working with partner workshops. [e-mail] · WhatsApp [phone].