👉 Vijay Jain – Scaling Consumer Brands & New Age Ventures

I was recently engaged with the founder of a consumer lifestyle business that had over 300 days of unsold inventory sitting across its stores and warehouses. The management team was under pressure. The board wanted answers. And the instinct — as it almost always is in these situations — was to discount, liquidate, and move stock.

It’s a familiar response. And a costly one. Inventory is a downstream reflection of upstream decisions.

End of season sales. Clearance racks. Quiet offloading to B2B channels at margins that hurt. Get the number down. Show progress. But what this playbook actually costs — in brand equity, pricing power, and future demand — rarely gets discussed in the same room as the decision to run it.

Despite all these measures, they were not able to make much headway. Sales were stagnant.

The management team’s diagnosis was clear: the reason for the stagnation was freshness. Without new stock, there was no reason for customers to return. The solution therefore was obvious — clear the old, bring in the new.

On the surface, that diagnosis is reasonable. In most consumer businesses, freshness drives demand. Which is precisely why it’s so easy to stop thinking there.

In this category, the customer purchase cycle is roughly five to seven years. Which means the person who bought last year isn’t coming back anytime soon. Neither is the one from three years ago, or five. At best, existing customers make occasional purchases — but not at a level that meaningfully drives growth. 

That constraint is real. But here’s what nobody in the room had said out loud.

For a new customer, this inventory doesn’t exist yet.

The 300-day-old piece sitting in a store is not “old stock” to someone who has never walked through that door. It has no history. No staleness. No baggage. It is simply a product waiting to be discovered.

Freshness drives repeat purchase. Discovery drives first purchase. In a long purchase cycle category, those are not the same problem — and they don’t have the same solution.

We weren’t short of product. We were short of new customers.

That shift sounds simple. In practice it requires resisting considerable pressure to do the obvious thing — because the obvious thing is visible, measurable, and shows up cleanly in a monthly review.

Which is where the real problem lives.

Supply chain thinking asks: how do we move what we have?

Demand thinking asks: who hasn’t found us yet?

The first drives discounting and liquidation. It treats the symptom and quietly signals distress — the last thing a luxury or semi-luxury business needs to communicate.

The second drives acquisition — finding the new customer for whom your existing inventory is a first introduction, not a leftover. It allows you to hold price and builds the customer base that sustains the business through the next purchase cycle.

But demand thinking has a structural disadvantage. It is slower. And it is often invisible in the short term

Discounting is not a strategy. It is a reporting response.

When a management team is measured on stock days, liquidation becomes the rational answer — not because it’s right, but because it’s the fastest way to show movement. The metric makes the wrong answer feel responsible.

I’ve sat in enough of these rooms to know how it plays out. The question is never asked directly — but it sits underneath every discussion: why hasn’t the number moved yet? And that question quietly forces the wrong answer. Not because the management team lacks conviction, but because the environment rewards activity, not conviction.

So good teams do the wrong thing, responsibly.

The best consumer businesses I’ve seen navigate this moment differently. They resist the visible answer long enough to pursue the right one — and have boards that understand the difference between movement and progress.

300 days of inventory is just a number.What it actually represents depends entirely on who you’re trying to reach next — and whether the room you’re sitting in gives you the space to think that way.

What appeared to be an inventory problem was, in fact, a question of demand.

About the author

Vijay Jain works with founders, promoters, senior management, and boards on decisions that shape direction and define how businesses scale. Over 25 years, he has operated as a founder, CEO, strategist, operating partner, and advisor.