If you want to understand if your customers are being impacted by your merchandise assortment, you can run my comp segment metrics (obviously) – you can run my Class Of Reporting (duh).
You can also measure what I call “Assortment Age”.
Take every item a customer purchased in September, and for those items calculate the number of months that item has been available to be sold. If it were introduced fifteen months ago, the age of that item is 15 months. Perform this for every item you sell.
Compare September 2026 to September 2025, to September 2024. What is the average age of the assortment the customer purchased?
You might see something like this:
- 2026 = 13.2 Months.
- 2025 = 18.1 Month.
- 2024 = 13.6 Months.
The 2025 metric should set off all sorts of alarm bells.
There are a thousand reasons why an assortment ages or is immature. It’s nearly impossible to balance the metric perfectly, teeter-totter style. Sometimes your assortment needs to be rebuilt and the assortment will be artificially “young”.
If you have a month where results aren’t ideal, go look at your merchandise assortment, calculate Assortment Age, and see what it tells you.
