What’s selling & what’s not?

Hey there my fabulous fashion friends!  So if you’ve clicked and you’re reading then you’re in for a treat, cause we’re about to deep dive into some really cool data… We took a look at all of the orders on Sonlet between August 20 and September 20 to see what’s really selling.  So here we go.  Don’t see what you’re looking for? No problem, just add a comment below, and I’ll see if I can help (we don’t discuss numbers of any individual sellers, but we are happy to share in aggregate some trends that might be helpful for running your business).

Before I deep dive some trends, you might want to check out another article I recently wrote… I honestly couldn’t write this one without doing the other one first… mostly because I always answer these questions in the same conversation.
Okay, so you’re already in business, and now you want to get to the juicy stuff… What styles are people really buying, what should you stock up on, and what should you drop out of your inventory?  Let’s get started really high level… we have data on the inventory people sell on Sonlet.  Here’s the overall break down:
What can you do with this info?  Well who knows…this includes everyone else’s data and can’t really be useful for your business, right? Kind of. There are all kinds of businesses and strategies out there, and there are some strategies where what I’m about to say doesn’t apply (like if you own the LuLaRoe Legging Store and only sell leggings, ignore what I’m about to say).  These numbers are important for you to look at to gauge whether the sales of your boutique are matching the overall market demand… blah, blah blah.  So cutting out the jargon, if you’re selling more bottoms than tops, then you’re probably missing out, and your customers are likely buying their tops from some other retailer.   Pull out more tops, or freshen up your tops inventory, and you’ll probably be able to sell more.  The other thing to pay attention to is the “Average Price Per Unit”.  Remember that’s an average, so don’t start marking up your T’s to $40, but keep in mind that shoppers on Sonlet are used to paying $38 for a top, and you can charge more for dresses.  You might not need to discount leggings down to wholesale… on average they go for $23 on Sonlet.  You might want to bookmark this page and then pop open your inventory page later, just to check what you’ve got in stock and see if you need to make some adjustments.
So let’s go a little deeper… of all the tops, what’s actually selling? Here you go… here are tops sales by size:
My take away from this little chart is to find a way to photograph and showcase all your sizes. If you only model a size XS or XXS you could be turning off customers because it turns out that there are more 3XL’s selling than XS’s.  Vice versa, if you’re always tailoring to the plus sizes, the Small’s and Medium’s make up 1/3 (34%) of the market.  As I mentioned above, all of your friends might be small’s, and the fact that you only ever sell them doesn’t mean that you’ve done anything wrong, but as you expand your business, you now have a good idea of what a healthy break down of our sizes should look like.
Now just because I can, and I think many of you will find this useful… Here’s the break down of tops by style for our users selling LuLaRoe styles:
I’m not going to try and deep dive exactly how to use this chart… It’s useful if you sell LuLaRoe styles and you’re not selling Irma’s, for example.  Overall, I’d recommend that you take a look at your own sales history and see if it’s lining up with the overall trends. If not, you might be able to make some tweaks that will make a difference in the way you stock your boutique.
Find this information useful?  Let me know in the comments below… we’ve got lots of more data like this, and we really would like to help.  As I mentioned above, I’ll never share any specific information about a particular boutique, but we’d love to know what aggregate statistics we can provide that will be helpful for you in running your business.

2 Comments

  1. So, this is from the data that you guys see from sonlet right? It doesn’t actually give info that’s been plugged into Bless? So, for example, if I sell say, a Perfect with some leggings, and I place it in the perfect category at $61, that’s gonna skew these numbers right? And if I sell a Large Sarah with a XX Carly and it’s in the Medium Outfits, it’s gonna be counted in the medium sizes right?

    • Wyatt Grantham

      Thanks for the comment Sandy. We do not have access to Bless data (since’s that’s LuLaRoe and we are Sonlet), and we are limited to the information that all of our users input into Sonlet. So, in the examples that you shared, if you add a Large Sarah with a 2X Carly into Sonlet as a Medium Outfit, that data is reflected as a Medium Outfit, and if you sell a Perfect with leggings for $61, then that will skew our numbers (and your inventory counts and tracking). However, because we’re using an average and we have over 50,000 Perfect Tees sold during this time period, these numbers are still really close, even with some bad data entry. Since you mention outfits…the numbers above actually categorize outfits as a bottom… (doesn’t totally make sense to go there, but we had to put it somewhere). So if there is a specific category that you need info on… just comment here and I’ll share what I can 🙂

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