{"id":7077733,"date":"2026-10-06T04:59:20","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T04:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7077733"},"modified":"2026-10-06T04:59:20","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T04:59:20","slug":"kevin-hillstrom-minethatdata-life-of-an-item","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7077733","title":{"rendered":"Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData: Life of an Item"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"post-body-2514890066517422877\" itemprop=\"description articleBody\">\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">In case you are wondering why I&#8217;m talking about items \/ merchandise more often, this is a process that happens every 3-5 years. Business doesn&#8217;t go the way we want it to, we focus on merchandise for awhile (which often fixes the problem), then we get away from merch and focus on marketing channels until marketing channels don&#8217;t work great (usually caused by merchandise problems) &#8230; and we repeat the cycle.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">We&#8217;re always repeating the cycle.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Sometimes our merchandise assortment gets stale. It happens to every company. It&#8217;s during the &#8220;stale periods&#8221; when we dig a bit deeper.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Let&#8217;s pretend you measure how much items sell by year &#8230; let&#8217;s pretend you&#8217;ve analyzed the dynamic for items you&#8217;ve offered for at least four years. You see the following.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Intro Stub Year = $50,000 per item.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">First Full Year = $75,000.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Second Full Year = $38,000.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Third Full Year = $19,000.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Fourth Full Year = $9,500.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">The item essentially generates $191,000 over the stub year and first four years. You don&#8217;t have unlimited warehousing space, so when an item dips below, say, $15,000, you discontinue the item and find something new. This means the life of the item is the stub year plus three full years.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Once you have a framework, you can identify the items in your assortment that are at the end of their life. You can communicate with your merchants that your customers need newness.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">This is the point in the discussion where somebody will raise their hand and offer me advice:<\/span><\/p>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">&#8220;I work in marketing, and I shouldn&#8217;t have to deal with merchandise performance, that&#8217;s why we have merchants. I should be allowed to focus on marketing.&#8221;<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Oh my little grasshopper.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Have you ever noticed that when business is off by 5% the Finance Team and the Merchant Team start asking questions about marketing? I notice it. It happens. All the time. It&#8217;s happened for the thirty-six years I&#8217;ve been in this business. Marketers are constantly being fired for merchandising sins.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Checks and balances are important. You do not want to be held accountable because your merchandising partners held on to old products too long. Measure the life of an item, and focus on communication when you notice that products are aging, potentially harming customer response.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In case you are wondering why I&#8217;m talking about items \/ merchandise more often, this is a process that happens every 3-5 years. Business doesn&#8217;t go the way we want it to, we focus on merchandise for awhile (which often fixes the problem), then we get away from merch and focus on marketing channels until [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12033],"tags":[13773,1987,13772,3333,13774],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7077733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analytics","tag-hillstrom","tag-item","tag-kevin","tag-life","tag-minethatdata"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData: Life of an Item - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7077733\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData: Life of an Item - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In case you are wondering why I&#8217;m talking about items \/ merchandise more often, this is a process that happens every 3-5 years. 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