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How much should you buy? I know, this is the question I get asked the most, so let's get into it.

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I think that you might be annoyed, but I want to explain to you how to figure out how to buy for your boutique business.

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Stay tuned. Okay, if we haven't met yet, hi, I'm Emily.

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I'm a boutique consultant.

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This is what I do every day, all day, is I help people understand how much to buy for their inventory.

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Your boutique business is changing quickly. And I just want to start everything off by saying it totally, totally depends on how much you sell. So if you're selling a million dollars a year, the answer to you is going to be really different than someone that's selling $1,000 year, right?

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I have very different perspectives on depending on your volume, how much inventory you should buy.

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I have a pretty strong opinion that to even know where to begin on how much inventory to buy, I need to know how much you've sold.

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So if you're asking me how much inventory to buy, who could I even figure this out for?

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Number one is you need to be selling something. If you're selling nothing, in your store, like nothing's moving, then I just want to tell you a fundamental something is off in your store. Your products, your customer, your marketing, something bigger is going on. But if you are making sales, and I'm going to say like $1,000 month, month, $10,000 a month no matter the scale if you really are selling and making money then a hundred percent We are able to understand how much

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to buy.

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Okay, so if you're just starting out this might not be for you We have another video about how to know how much inventory to buy when you're just starting out right here Okay, so now that I have the experienced

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people in the room, maybe you don't consider yourself experienced because you're kind of new, but tell me down in the comments what stage of your business that you're at for your boutique.

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I want to know so we can just create more content for you on the channel.

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It's important to know your sales and how much to buy and understanding that those two things go together because you should always be buying based on your sales. So it's not about like, how much do I buy? It's the first question is always, how much do you sell?

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How many bicycles do you sell a month?

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How many bottoms do you sell a month? How many pairs of shoes do you sell? And then even within that, I would always look at like, what size sold best? What colors sold best? Are there trends that we're seeing?

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Are you selling a bunch of tops and not any bottoms? What's going on? Do they not go with each other?

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When we analyze your sales and we understand how much, what, and what the makeup is of that inventory, then we're able to more accurately say, okay, this is how much you should buy. Looking at your sales is really important. And I think that a lot of people kind of look at their sales all the time.

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So they feel like they're always analyzing it. They're always understanding because you're like looking at your daily sales totals.

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But truthfully, like you need to be looking at your sales numbers every single week and every single month. Then I would say like zoom out, you could do quarterly, half yearly and yearly. And But the most important thing is that week by week, you're understanding how much inventory you sold and then what needs to replace it.

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One of the very basic things that a lot of people get wrong out the gate from starting their boutique business, and if this is you, that's okay. But a lot of people don't enter their items into their POS list.

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system quite right. So whether you're using Shopify, Square, WooCommerce, whatever it looks like for you, it's really important for you actually to input the data correctly. So let me give you an example. A lot of times what we see is people will say, the Emily dress, okay, or the Emily.

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First of all, if you name things just the Emily, You've got to make sure you've got product categories like really on lock.

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The thing about entering data, so as you receive items, as you enter the data into your system about that item, the more detailed you are, the better decisions you can make going forward because what spits out on the back

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end from all that data is an understanding of what those items are, what made them special, what made them unique.

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My biggest pet peeve is people using quick sale, quick sale, quick sale. If you use quick sale for everything, actually none of this will work for you.

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We can do a basic buying plan for you.

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We could, but it's not going to be as accurate as someone who entered their items as the Emily polka dot midi dress. It's just that's going to give us so much more information than just Emily dress or quick sale. I want to stop you for just a minute. If you heard that and you're like, I have never named anything.

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I do quick sales all the time. Stop feeling shame.

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Let's just move forward better. Okay.

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So as you move forward, forward, what you're going to do as you enter your product into your system.

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So you receive your pen, you get the box of pens, it's 12 pens, you're going to enter the 12 pens and you're going to say Uniball Vision Elite Black Pen, back ballpoint pen maybe.

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If you're a pen expert, tell me below, what kind of pen would you put this under?

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You're going to add as information as you can without it being like ridiculous. Some people like their names are like 15 words long. Honestly, if you describe the silhouette, the color, the shape, anything like unique about it, that's what's most important. And you could even say, I'm going to enter this in as something that's important to my customer even. So like if my customer thinks that it's important or in that it has a three-quarter sleeve or a ruffle bottom or a peplum waist, do that as well, right? Anything that's descriptive but also kind of sells it, that's where you hit the goldmine, okay? That's where, not only from a marketing perspective, are you doing well, but you're also, from a data perspective, entering your data in a way that it's going to spit out reports that make sense and that are workable. At the end of the day, I know this is so boring.

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Are you bored? I'm joking, but honestly, I started this off by saying, how much should I buy? How much inventory should I buy? And I'm back in here saying, well, how are you entering your data? How are you entering your product information?

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Because what I'll tell you is the more accurate your product information as you enter it into a point of sale system, the better reports are going to spit out the end. The better buying will do for the future, right?

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So it all is building on top of each other. The more complex your products, the bigger revenue you do, the harder it's going to be. But the more opportunity there is to grow the business because we're seeing more happen, right?

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So all of this leads into like me saying, I just want you to to be able to scale your business.

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Also, if you have been doing this a long time, you're like, my data is entered. Well, I know what I'm doing.

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I just don't know really how much to buy.

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You need to understand how to create a buying plan.

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Okay, so the how of this and the real like, how do I get myself to understand how much to buy is to create a buying plan. We have a software coming called My Buy Plans, and we know how to do this manually, but really a buy plan is your guide. Your guide to going to a market, going on a vendor website, and being able to buy exactly what you need at the right cost, at the right retail, the right amount of packs or units.

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All of that comes from a buy plan.

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So to just scroll back here, We're getting our product, we're getting our pen, we're entering it into the system really well, and then we're selling it. And at the end of the week, the end of the month, the end of the year, we're looking at how many units of this pen did we sell?

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How many did we sell in black? In blue? We sold none! Oh no! We shouldn't sell pens anymore! All of the information comes from the data.

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from day one all the way through the selling reports. And then from those sales reports, we know how much to buy.

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We can see how many units sold and how much we project to sell for the rest of the year.

7:39 - Unidentified Speaker

When we project these sales, we can look at what we did last year. We can look at what we did last month. And everything going forward in terms of how to predict sales is easy. A lot of people think, oh, you can't predict sales. That's not possible. The market's up and down. Your customers are up and down. That's not true. If you have up to a year of sales data from your boutique business or from your retail store, we can very accurately predict between 6 and 12 months of what your sales will be and exactly how much to buy each and every one of those months. So if you're sitting here feeling like my sales are up and down, they're all over the place. Yeah, they are because you're buying all over the place. And what I would say is we need to analyze what you sold and what's up and what's down and make sure you have the right inventory at the right time for the right price for the right customer ready to go. When you have all that available, your sales are very predictable. So it's kind of like what came first, the chicken or the egg, but you really don't know how much to buy until you know how much you sell. And again, if you're in this position where you're like, I haven't bought anything, Emily, that's okay. We do have an how to intro to buying right here. And I'm happy to help you figure out how much to buy for your initial launch of your retail business. So hopefully this helped give you a little bit better of a perspective. If you want more information, you can always comment below or send me an email. Click on this next video to find out more about how to make more profit using your sales and inventory. See you on the next one.