Sporting Goods Store Case Study

Case Study

Pulled off a miracle

This was a two store liquidation.  The stores were in malls in cities 45 miles apart.  One Consultant was assigned to liquidate both stores.  The plan was to start both sales at the same time then after 2 weeks close the smaller store and move the balance of the inventory to the larger better store where the sale would last several more weeks.  Our Pre-Showing got both sales off to good starts.  Midway through packing the merchandise in the smaller store to move it the owner got notice he had one week to vacate the larger store.  We had to unpack the smaller store merchandise, redisplay it and at the same time pack up the merchandise in the larger store and move it to the smaller store.  A week after we got that done the owner got notice from this mall that he had one week to vacate his good location in the mall. But!!! The mall had a very poor location in the back of the mall that he could rent for the duration of the sale.  Starting inventory was $233,000 and even with all of these problems we were able to generate sales of $203,500 plus we sold the fixtures for $7,200.  Our customer incentive program had 618 customers participating.  It pulled customer traffic to the back of the mall where the store was last located and stimulated them to buy more and more merchandise as the sale progressed.  It helped us hold media advertising expenses to $2,000 or .09% of sales.  This could have been a very profitable sale, but under the circumstances the owner thought we had pulled off a miracle!