What tough decisions are you avoiding? 

Here was mine… 

First, some context: when we’re not helping our product sourcing clients grow their brands, we are running our own home storage brand and have been since 2017. 

It’s been a wild ride, seeing us launch 35+ products in three marketplaces. At our peak, we were doing around $2 million USD per year in revenue with healthy profitability. 

The Rise and Fall of Sales

Like many home goods brands, we saw high sales during the Covid years and reinvested a lot back into inventory to keep up with demand. 

And like many home goods brands, sales dropped off in early 2022 due to many factors: inflation driving low consumer confidence, consumers having frontloaded purchases, shift from buying goods to more services, rise of dollar-store-quality competitors like Temu, and the list goes on… 

We Needed to Pivot

We were forced to pivot, keeping many products that continue to do well but cutting other poor performers. 

This past week, after trying many strategies and dwelling on the decision for far too long, I decided it was time to cut one of our all-time best sellers. 

Emotionally, I was attached. I had personally designed that product from scratch, sketching it out at my kitchen table one summer’s night in 2017 after my son had gone to bed. It launched in 2018 and over the years sold $700k worth of units. It was highly reviewed, with customers sharing happy pictures of it featuring in their family meals and memories. 

The Not-So-Happy Decision

But staring me in the face was a not-so-happy decision that needed to be made. 

It was costing us more to store and advertise on than we were making back and Q4 Amazon storage rates are looming. The losses were piling up month after month. No changes we tried were working. At a “monthly” level the losses didn’t look like much, but the cumulative effect over a year on the business definitely would be felt. 

Over time, I have built this habit of self-talk, where, when faced with decisions, I tell myself that now it’s time to “think like the business.” Or, in other words, forcing myself to remove the emotion and purely look at the numbers to make a more objective decision. 

The Aftermath

Ultimately, with this decision, the order to destroy (donate) all remaining units of that product was put in with our warehouse partner, our bill settled, and that was it. The relief was instant. The sadness of losing one of my “product babies” had already been felt and was compounded by me delaying the decision. 

I never shy away from tough decisions or conversations but oftentimes wish I had them earlier. Because every time the result is a stronger business or a deeper, more authentic relationship. 

How about you, how do you approach decision making?