5 Clever Ways to Save Money on Apparel Stock, Manage Inventory and Improve Cash Flow: A Blog About How to Save Money on Stocks for Your Business

For small-scale or newly formed businesses that operate on tight financial budgets, every penny matters. Saving money can be the main determining factor for any apparel line, irrespective of the other processes. A big factor to consider, which is often ignored in saving money, is inventory planning. 

Efficiently manage your inventory, and you will directly see an improvement in cash flows. Proper stock management is the key to saving funds, which can then be utilized in better ways. This will significantly improve the financial health of your clothing brand. 

Keep on reading to discover five clever ways of inventory planning that would save you a lot of money in the long run. 

1. Demand Forecasting

Demand forecasting is one of the most important factors for ensuring proper inventory planning. Here, you establish the quantity of clothing-related items you will need beforehand over the duration of a week, month, or year. For best results, your forecasting skills should be near-perfect. 

You will have to try various metrics that can assist in perfectly predicting a demand. Such metrics are market trends, last year’s sales results, planned ad expenditure, cyclical events associated with demand rise or fall, etc. 

Investing in a reliable inventory planning system is an effective way to boost forecasting skills. Such a system will make it easy for you to deduce trends. Otherwise, manually deducing trends from stored data is an arduous and complex process. A reliable software of inventory planning presents data in a simple format that can be easily digested. 

2. Categorization

Dividing your inventory into categories is another way toward effective inventory planning. A good way is to divide it into three categories. Below is a description of this categorization:

●      A: high value, low volume clothing merchandise

●      B: medium value, medium volume clothing merchandise

●      C: low value, high volume merchandise

Cloth cleaning supplies have low value for a clothing line and can be kept with high volume on hand. As such, they will fall into category C.

In contrast, a premium-quality fabric is quite expensive to acquire and so you should keep only a low volume of it. This is a good example of category A.

3. Follow the FIFO Approach

FIFO is a marketing and inventory approach that means “first in, first out.” It’s a principle that is very effective for maintaining a suitable stock level. 

How does the FIFO approach actually work? Here, the oldest clothing products (first in) will be at the storage system’s front. As such, these clothing products would be the first out. That way, you can regularly and consistently cycle your clothing products through your inventory from oldest to newest.

4. Indulge in Dropshipping

This inventory management technique is not for every type of apparel business.  However, for businesses, it works. This technique is very efficient in positively influencing the bottom line. Here, a clothing business accepts customer orders but does not keep the products in stock. 

Dropshipping allows you to directly ship goods to your customers from the manufacturer. Sometimes you would be required to pay for this service. However, in most instances, the dropshipping cost is significantly less than the cost of on-site inventory maintenance.

For many small businesses, dropshipping has become a popular way to plan inventory and save money.  Also, you can avoid expenses that may be incurred when you manage big warehouses, thanks to dropshipping. Avoiding traditional inventory planning measures is the key to making significant savings in cost. 

5. Automate Your Operations

Manually recording every transaction for a clothing business is now a thing of the past. Thanks to the advent of modern technologies, you can track sales records and shipments easily with a few clicks.

There is no need to hire multiple data entry clerks for conducting long and complicated manual reconciliations. Now you can simply invest in inventory software that would automatically maintain all necessary records.

Conclusion

Efficient inventory planning could be the answer to your clothing business’s financial woes. Just try the methods mentioned above, and you will notice the difference in cost savings yourself. Saving costs is the secret of any successful fashion brand, and what better way to do so than maintaining a well-organized inventory.   

Fashinza is a remarkable platform that would help you find the right type of manufacturer for your clothing brand. Whatever type of manufacturer you require, the highly talented Fashinza team will handle it for you. Our goal-oriented team is very much capable of searching for high-quality manufacturers. Contact Fashinza today to find the right type of manufacturer for your business.