What I'm Changing In My Business For Q4 Success

It’s been a funny Q2 in my product businesses. My homeware business with its seasonally appropriate hand drawn patterns and emphasis on long, lingering al fresco lunches has struggled in the absolut deluge we’re calling a British Summer.

By contrast, my candles and fragrance company has been absolutely thriving in the inclement weather with inexpensive options for a mid month treat. 

But, regardless of Summer success (or failure), all eyes are focused on the jewel in the ecommerce crown - Q4.

Further reading: Ultimate 2024 Ecommerce Retail Calendar Dates to Boost Sales

And, as we focus on growth in sales, cash and profit in the golden quarter, I wanted to share the three key focuses for us. 

For context, we’re both a manufacturer and a brand.

We do much of our business making for other brands under a ‘private label’ model, but for our own brands (Pintail Candles and Avalon Home) we sell directly, via Amazon and Wolf & Badger and through about 500 independent retailers. 

Firstly, we’re collecting our data early.

As a manufacturer, we can often be tempted to lean too much into a ‘just in time’ supply chain model - we can ‘make to order’ so we do.

However, when we look at our wholesale customers in Q4, this just doesn’t work. It makes our lead times 3-4 weeks (In November?! Madness) when they need to be no more than 3-4 days to replenish empty shop shelves. 

In 2024 we used a pre order model for our stockists to get our data early.

We’ve used this in combination with our historical sales data to forecast which of our brand new seasonal lines will be the most popular this winter, so we can build stock for them now. 

Secondly, we’re reforecasting our line level stock holding.

We use a min/max system on a four week look back window (thank you Hobbycraft for teaching me this in my youth!). So, every Monday we review how much stock is on our shelves vs how much sold in the last four weeks and if we need to make more.

For pre order stock, we tend to use a shorter window of data - which means when a product launches for immediate dispatch we already know what it should be selling every week. 

Thirdly, we’re reviewing our partnership stockholding.

For our direct to consumer sales, we use Amazon very much as a secondary warehouse. As we can deliver in bulk we choose to use our Amazon store almost as a secondary warehouse.

Our dispatch area is very limited on space (thats a 2025 project!) and so by sending some of our seasonal range into Amazon early, we can direct our customers here and know fulfillment isn't something we need to worry about.