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Did you just type into Google?

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How do I get rid of all my old inventory or?

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I have far too much inventory.

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I need to figure out how to sell it or boutique inventory ideas.

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I'm here for you.

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I have helped so many boutique owners get rid of unsold inventory.

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And in this video, I'm gonna walk you through the same steps I done with them to be able to make a profit, move through inventory faster and not do it again.

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Today, we are going to talk about why something didn't sell, what to do with what you have sitting around and how to come out the other side, making money, knowing what to do next and understanding how you don't get yourself in that situation again.

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Welcome to the Booster Boutique podcast.

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I'm your host, Emily Benson, corporate merchant turned boutique owner, turned consultant.

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I want you to start grow and scale your boutique business right here with me.

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If you're ready to master your mindset margins and marketing, you're in the right place if we haven't met yet.

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Hi, I'm Emily Benson and I'm a boutique coach.

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I'm a consultant.

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This is what I do.

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I love the numbers of retail and I'm here to make them easy for you.

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If you're a boutique owner or an ecommerce seller, and you want to learn more about inventory management marked out and sales, how to get rid of old inventory.

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Subscribe to my channel.

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This is what I talk about all day long in this video.

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Today, we are going to talk about why something didn't sell, what to do with what you have sitting around and how to come out other side, making money, knowing what to do next and understanding how you don't get yourself in that situation again.

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First things first, there's no shame that something didn't sell.

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We get so personal about our inventory but to become a better CEO and a better profitable boutique business, you have to look at what didn't work as an experiment and the result of the experiment.

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So I want you to take a good hard look whether that's through pulling reports from Shopify or just organizing your inventory in two buckets.

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Why didn't it sell?

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What was wrong with it?

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Was it a vendor problem?

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We have to figure out why that thing didn't sell.

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And you might be sitting here saying, oh, no, no, Emily.

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I know exactly why it didn't sell.

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It was too small, it was too tight, it got delivered two weeks, too late and, you know, I missed the season for it as long as you know, why those things didn't sell, you're going to have a better understanding, moving forward for what you should buy.

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Listen, if you're sitting here and you're in your 1st 3 to 6 to 12 months of your boutique business, I want you to know that no one expected you to buy anything correctly.

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The first year is just an experiment.

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You buy what you like, you buy what you think will sell and you find out if it does, that's the whole point of this.

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OK?

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So we have to get away from judging what happened or feeling bad about it or saying I'm so in debt, I'm so in debt.

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This is the first problem is that people get too obsessed with like making their money back and like breaking even and worrying about the debt on their credit card.

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The most important thing you figure out why it didn't sell.

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I'm, I'm serious because you're never going to run a successful boutique if you don't know why something old and why it didn't.

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And that includes the data points behind it.

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If you need to start counting the inventory and saying, OK, 10 pieces are too small.

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20 pieces came too late and actually they're all from the same vendor.

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That's interesting.

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I have 60 pieces that didn't sell because people didn't like it.

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It's just like it was a, it was a bomb and then maybe you'll have lots of little things left over like a piece here, a piece here a piece here.

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I want to tell you about a client.

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I had Megan, she had an Ecommerce boutique which she ran from a studio right next to her house.

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She had done really well and grown her business to like 5060 $70,000 months.

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Right.

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This is just online ecommerce.

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She's doing this.

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She's shipping it.

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It was amazing.

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But she had plateaued.

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She got to this point where she said, I don't understand.

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I have all this leftover inventory.

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I don't know what to buy next.

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It was actually around this time of the year.

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It was like August September, October.

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She was like, I really want to go and to fall knowing that I'm gonna make my money because if I can't turn this business around, we actually think we have to close it.

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And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, how are you going from making 50 $60,000 in revenue a month to feeling like you have to close like this is not good.

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What, what's going on?

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So they decided to work with me and I flew down to their studio, we went through the styles on rack.

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I said, have this prepared for me before I got there.

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I said, listen, I'd like for you to just prep a rack of anything that just didn't sell.

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Like you have a lot left over, it was a flop or you've had to mark it down and it still won't sell, put that on a rack for me.

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And then when I get there, we're going to go through it together.

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We're going to figure this out because I find that so many boutique owners want to say, oh, it didn't sell because the traffic, the economy this that no babe, like you bought the wrong stuff.

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It didn't fit your ideal class.

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It doesn't work at that price point.

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It doesn't make sense in your assortment.

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Like there's something fundamentally wrong with your product assortment.

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And that's ok because honestly, that's fixable.

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Like your price point is fixable.

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Your product assortment is fixable.

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If you have a core group of customers and you're making a good amount of money and you plateau, it's an inventory issue.

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It's not always a customer issue.

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And that's the point where people start to say, oh, I should run Facebook ads.

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I should no, come back to your.

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We were able to identify exactly what was up with her inventory.

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She did a big huge sidewalk sale, got rid of all that stuff because of the work we did together, Megan was able to turn her business around.

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We worked on price points, we worked on pricing structures and because of what we learned from what didn't sell, we bought her fall and holiday assortment so that she was profitable.

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So she hit 100 k months 2 to 3 months later and she maintained that and grew it to even bigger months than that.

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But this was a person who was ready to close their store because they just couldn't make it work even making 50 $60,000 a month.

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Right.

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Because the math is deeper than just how much money you're making.

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So, you have a massive opportunity right now, if you sit here with inventory to make more money right now, make more profit because inventory is just money on hangers.

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Ok.

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That's what my dad always said to me.

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He said it's just your money sitting right there.

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How do we get rid of it though?

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What are some tips and tricks to work through it and still not have to just give it away which you may have to do at the end of this.

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I'm going to give you those ideas.

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But before I do that, I'm going to tell you about a free webinar that I'm teaching, it's called underpaid.

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And I'm going to basically go even deeper into these concepts around debt, profit, inventory management with the ultimate goal of you getting paid in your boutique business.

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It gives me so much pleasure when I get texts, when I get emails of boutique owners saying that they've made this much more money that they are finally paying themselves, that they paid for a trip or they paid for a home renovation with the money that they've made from their boutique business.

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I want that for you.

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And I know because maybe you don't have a boutique background.

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You just don't know the math.

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You just don't know where to look.

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That's what I'm going to teach you in this webinar.

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I'm going to show you where your money drains are.

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I'm going to teach you how to get rid of your debt faster than you ever thought possible and will help make you more profitable in the next six months.

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If you're already making money in your boutique, you have to sign up for this webinar.

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It's one of the best ones I teach.

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You're going to walk away with such great information.

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And honestly, you'll also learn about a program that I've put together that walks you step by step through this framework and we guarantee that you will make more profit or revenue in the next six months in this program.

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If you implement the work, if you do the work in your business, we know it works because math doesn't lie.

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If you want to sign up for underpaid, you have to do is comment below underpaid and we will send you the link so that you can register for that live webinar.

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And I'm excited to see you there.

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It's going to be one of the first live webinars I've taught in a while.

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I've been doing a lot of consulting behind the scenes and coaching calls, but I'm excited to see you there.

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If you're new to my audience, I want to welcome you into my email list because I give you so much more information there.

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So if you're watching this on youtube or you're listening on my podcast.

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Absolutely.

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Please click the links below or again, type in under.

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We'll send you the link so you can reserve your seat and get on my email list.

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Get even more tips and tricks and alerts when I come out with exclusive content.

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So what are the ways to get rid of this inventory?

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Here we go.

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Number one, if you have things that are all the same department, meaning you have a ton of dresses left, you have a ton of bottoms, denim leggings, right?

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Thinking about departments.

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Thinking about price points.

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The first question that you want to ask yourself when you have excess inventory is all the inventory really similar.

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So, does it come from the same department?

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Is it similar priced?

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Is there anything about it where you could lump things together and make groups of things or is it not?

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Is it just all over the place?

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You have ones, you have twos, you have gifts, you have home, you have clothes like it's all over the place.

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That's the first question you want to ask.

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So if it is all the same, let's say you have a ton of overstocked summer dresses or maybe a style of denim that you bought just didn't really do well and you know, you can't pack it up for next, you know, it's not going to work later.

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What you want to do is a department sale and go deep.

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I always say to people you need to mark down at least 30% off in your first hit.

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That means that when you go from full price down to the sale price, I want you to reduce it by 30%.

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And usually what I recommend people do is actually take the tag if you can.

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If you have a brick and mortar, cross that number out and write the new price in.

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People don't want to do math.

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Ok, I need you to understand that.

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As a store owner, you don't like math either.

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Ok.

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And no one wants to come into your store and hear.

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Oh, this is 30%.

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No, like just make it easy for them.

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So you either take a deep discount sale or let's say it's a lot of the same.

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Let's say you have a lot of dresses, you kind of overbought some dresses.

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They're all between like 4555 $65.

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You might do a buy more, save more.

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You might say, you know what the average retail of all my dresses is about $50.

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What I'm gonna do is I'll say all my dresses are on sale.

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If you buy one, it's $50 regardless of the price.

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You want to make it the lowest price though.

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Sorry, let me clarify.

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You want to make it the lowest price that would be like your main price that you're gonna base everything off of.

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The idea is that your customer is going to buy more to then save more money.

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So they buy one and they get 10% off, they buy two, they get 20% off, they buy three, they get 30% off.

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I used to do this with leggings.

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I had a best selling style legging.

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It was a great Black Friday promotion, honestly, but I would take these black leggings and I would say, ok, one pair of normally $20 as a promotion today, we're doing them for $15 for one pair.

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So you already are going to get about 25% off.

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Then if you buy more, you ended up getting a bigger discount.

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So I would say two pairs for 28 3 pairs for 35.

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I would just slowly creep up that number.

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So people thought, wow, I could have gotten one pair for $20 yesterday, but today I could get three pairs for only $15 more.

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That's wild.

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Now again, you wanna watch your margin.

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Do you want to make sure that you're baking that in?

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But doing something like a buy more, save more is a nice way to move through units when you feel like you have a lot of units.

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Now, let's say you answer that you don't have a lot of the same.

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You just have a lot of stuff and you just really need to get through some units, you need to get through this like PC PC inventory that you have.

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This is a great opportunity to use a bag sale.

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Now, whether you decide to do a mystery bag sale or a fill of the bag sale.

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Either one again, we're just getting through units.

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We're letting people kind of like get what they get and hopefully not get too upset and we're grouping things.

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So let's say you're going to do a mystery bag.

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You're going to say I will put five items size small in a bag.

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The real retail value of all that is $200 300 dollars.

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I don't know when you buy it as a mystery bag because you don't know what it is.

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We're going to give it to you for $100.

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We're going to give it to you for $80.

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Like you want to make it a deal.

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So whatever that ratio needs to be, sometimes it's three pieces, sometimes it's five, sometimes you're like, again, fill the bag, that would be a little bit different, right?

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So the mystery bag is the idea that you're pre filling it, selling it at a price that's deeply discounted because your customer doesn't know what's in it.

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The second way to do a bag sale is a fill the bag sale.

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This is really fun at like December for a VIP like event.

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You know, again, when you have sort of a lot of end of season inventory left over the concept for the fill the bag is that you have either one or two size bags.

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People pay a certain amount to buy the bag and then they can fill it with whatever they want.

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Now, you may want to put boundaries on this.

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I always say for any of these sales too, please don't do too many things that are like store wide unless you really are desperate.

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Very few people in retail would ever recommend you do like a store wide sale.

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It's like almost a signal that you're going out of business.

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And so we don't really want to do that.

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But these are ways where we can really get through inventory when we just feel like we have a whole basement full or we have tons of leftover stuff.

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I have met people that have 7305 $100,000 in inventory sitting in the back.

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I actually had one person tell me they had $17 million in inventory and I almost died.

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It was unsalable.

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So you're a couple racks in the back, my friend, they're nothing.

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Ok, like calm down.

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It's gonna be ok.

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Use these tips.

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I'll remind you once again, please like, subscribe, comment below.

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Let me know what you think about this content.

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You need more clarity on it.

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And if you want to sign up to be in my world, I'd love for you to join me for my free live webinar called underpaid.

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It is for you if you feel like you're making money, but you're really not paying yourself.

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And the math doesn't make sense to you.

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I want you to make a profit.

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I want you to get out of debt and this webinar is going to show you how to do that.

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So, thanks so much for joining me.

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As always, here's to making lots of friends and making lots of money.

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I'll see you on the next one.

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Bye.