With fall product launches on the horizon, now is the moment for salon owners to examine their retail lineup—what’s working, what’s not, and what to make room for.

For salon owners, fall is the most important buying window of the year. New products start landing in October and November, your window for maximizing product sales is opening soon, and the shelf you build in the fall will set the stage for success in your busiest months. That makes right now—not November, when the new releases are already shipping—the time to take an honest look at what’s behind the counter.

This evaluation process is integral not just to make sure you have the best options but also to eliminate excess. An often overlooked reality is that too much can be just as problematic as not enough.

“We don’t want a customer to come in and be super overwhelmed by package offerings, EFTs, and all of the products,” says Makayla Thomas, International Sales Trainer at Devoted Creations. The instinct to carry more, she notes, often works against the sale—and against the team selling it. “You sell what you feel confident talking about,” she says. A lineup a team has actually used and can speak to will move faster than a bigger one nobody has mastered, which makes the pre-season review as much subtraction as it is addition.

You also need to start considering how to manage the transition period, phasing out the old and phasing in the new in a strategic manner. Bringing in a whole new lineup in one fell swoop creates similar problems with training and sales. “Do not overwhelm clients with 20 new items at once,” says Gina Jaeger-Morris, Director of Sales & Business Development at Sun Evolutions. At the same time, she says, you don’t want to jump to conclusions about your current options: “Sometimes products do not fail because they are bad products. They simply lose visibility or excitement over time.”

Balancing all of that—what to add, what to cut, what to hold onto—is what makes the pre-season review worth doing carefully, and worth starting now.

“A lot of new products come out in October and November, so this time of year, our goal is always to encourage salons to take a look at their top and bottom reports and what products performed well and not as well for the season,” says Jess Snider, Account Executive at New Sunshine. The task isn’t just adding what’s new—it’s examining the whole lineup, deciding what’s earning its space and what needs to change before the new arrivals compete for room. “Consider what you’re phasing out now so that hopefully opens up some room to decide if you need a product for a certain price point and category. Have a strategy to slowly phase out inventory to prepare for new products,” Snider says.

Click here to read the entire article in the latest issue of Smart Tan Magazine online.