Guide

How to price dead stock without losing money

Every small shop has it: the rail of last winter’s coats, the sizes that never sold, the order that looked right in March and wrong by June. Dead stock is not a character flaw of your buying — it is a pricing problem, and pricing problems have methods. This is the one we use, written out so you can run it by hand even if you never use our software.

First, name what is actually dead

“Slow” and “dead” are different animals. A reasonable line: if an item has not sold in 90 days — or roughly one full season past when you expected it to — it is dead stock. Before 90 days it is slow, and slow stock often fixes itself with a better position on the floor or a feature in a window. Marking down slow stock too early is the most expensive habit in retail, because you are discounting things that would have paid full price.

So: export your inventory, sort by days since it arrived, and separate the pile honestly. Everything below this line of the article is about the dead pile only.

The floor: your cost is the line you never cross

Before setting any price, write down what each item actually cost you. That number is your floor. A price below cost is not a discount, it is paying a customer to take your inventory — and once you count the handling time, it is usually cheaper to donate. Every price you set in the ladder below stays at or above this number. If the honest market price is below your cost, the honest answer is a lot sale or a donation receipt, not a pretend price.

The ladder: three prices, two dates

Instead of one panic markdown, set three prices on the day you declare the stock dead:

• First ask — the realistic full-market price for the item’s condition and season, even though it did not sell at that level before. Dead stock at a fair price still finds a buyer who missed it the first time.
• Day-7 step — roughly 15–20% below first ask. This catches the comparison shoppers and the deal-hunters without punishing anyone who paid full price a week earlier.
• Day-14 step — roughly 30–35% below first ask, still at or above your cost floor. In practice, most of what will ever sell from a dead pile sells by this step.

Write the dates on the tag when you set the prices. A ladder you have to remember is a ladder you will not follow, and consistency is the whole trick — customers learn that your markdowns mean something, so they buy at step one instead of waiting you out.

When a lot beats a markdown

If a whole category is dead — an entire order, a failed size run — one item at a time may not be worth the floor space. Resellers who buy in boutique-sized lots will take a coherent group: one category, a manifest, a price per lot. You recover your cost in one transaction instead of thirty, and the shelf empties on a Tuesday instead of a quarter. This is the gap between a markdown and a clearance: a markdown reprices the past, a lot sale converts it.

A short honesty checklist

• Did you count days, or did you count feelings?
• Is every rung of the ladder at or above cost?
• Did you write the dates down, or just intend them?
• Would a lot sale clear the whole pile for more than the ladder will?

If you would rather not run this by hand, that is the thing Brimlot does: upload your inventory export and it reads which stock is genuinely dead, free, with the price ladder built and your cost enforced as the floor. It is run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is why the analysis costs nothing to give. If the read looks right, a one-time clearance run puts the lot in front of resellers for $274 ($249 plus a 10% success fee); if not, the read was free.

Resellers and vintage shops can join the buyer side free at our resellers page, and everyone is welcome to browse what is currently on the block in the outlet.