How do I decide which vendors to stop buying from?

Your dead-on-arrival inventory list reveals vendor patterns that individual style failures can mask. After identifying your worst-performing products — styles received before April with fewer than three units sold — group them by vendor. If the same vendor appears three or more times, that's not a coincidence or a one-off miss. It's a vendor relationship problem.

One boutique owner who ran this exercise for the first time discovered that just three vendors were responsible for over half her dead stock. That clarity about who to stop ordering from was worth more than any sales tactic she'd tried. Build a simple two-column scorecard: vendor name and number of DOA SKUs.

Before cutting a vendor entirely, have a direct conversation. Share the specific styles that didn't perform, ask whether the line is evolving for fall, and use the data to negotiate better terms or return options. But if two consecutive seasons show the same pattern from the same vendor, that's a clear signal to redirect that buying budget to vendors whose products your customers actually want.