Dead stock is cash you already spent. Here's how to find it.

Dead stock is the least dramatic problem in retail. There's no stockout, no empty peg, no angry customer at the counter. A few thousand SKUs simply stop selling, and because nothing visibly breaks, nobody goes looking. By the time someone does, the only lever left is the markdown pen. And by then you're not managing inventory anymore. You're managing loss.

In the chart above, 17% of everything launched this season has gone to zero. That is not clutter or a tidiness problem. It's working capital you already converted into product, now sitting on a shelf, earning nothing and quietly aging toward a discount. The good news: dead stock is one of the few inventory problems you can see coming, provided you measure the right thing.

"Old" is the wrong test for dead stock

The instinct is to hunt dead stock by age. Aging reports bucket inventory into 30-, 60-, 90-, and 180-day piles and flag whatever's oldest. It's a reasonable starting point, and it's how most teams still do it. But age on its own misleads in both directions.

A year-round basic that's sat on the floor 200 days and still turns steadily isn't dead; it's a workhorse. A fashion launch that's 40 days old at zero sell-through is already dead. It just hasn't aged far enough to trip your report yet. Time tells you how long something has been sitting. It doesn't tell you whether it's moving.

That's why the view we're using, Inventory Pulse, doesn't sort by age at all. It sorts every SKU into four bands by sell-through velocity:

• Fast Moving: sell-through ≥ 60%. That 60% line isn't arbitrary; it's roughly where the apparel industry calls demand "healthy."
• Medium: 30–59%. Selling, but worth watching.
• Slow Moving: 1–29%. Underperforming; a markdown or reallocation candidate.
• Dead Stock: 0%. Months on the floor with effectively no offtake.

The real cost is cash, not clutter

It's tempting to file dead stock under housekeeping: crowded backrooms, messy shelves. The real cost sits on the balance sheet, and it compounds every month it goes unaddressed.

• Trapped working capital. Every dead SKU is cash you turned into product that hasn't turned back into cash. It can't fund next season's buy.
• Carrying cost. Storage, handling, insurance, shrinkage and obsolescence (commonly estimated at 20–30% of an item's value per year) bleed quietly for as long as it lingers.
• The markdown tax. Dead stock rarely leaves at full price, and the longer you wait, the deeper the cut. End-of-season sell-through under ~60% is exactly what escalates markdowns.
• Opportunity cost. The shelf facing, the open-to-buy dollars, the planner's attention: all spent on something that isn't selling instead of something that could.

Finding every dead SKU in one click

A percentage is a headline, not a to-do list. The reason banding by sell-through matters is that the headline is also a filter. Click the Dead Stock band and those 7,358 abstract SKUs become a working list: barcode, product, division, MRP, launch date, the store and warehouse units still sitting, and the revenue riding on each.

Sort that list by units on hand to see where the cash is trapped. Filter by region or store to learn whether something is dead everywhere or just in the wrong doors. Group by division to see whether the problem is a whole category or a one-off. That last distinction is the one that changes the decision:

• A SKU dead in every store is a buying miss: stop replenishing it and plan the exit.
• A SKU dead in ten stores but selling in forty isn't dead at all. It's misallocated, and the fix is a transfer, not a markdown.

From a list to a plan

Once the dead SKUs are named, the moves are boring in the best possible way:

• Stop feeding them. Pull them from replenishment immediately so you don't deepen the hole.
• Consolidate. Pool scattered units into the few stores where the item still has a pulse; clear it from the rest.
• Exit deliberately. Sequence markdowns, bundles or off-price by revenue-at-risk, worst first, while the discount needed is still shallow.
• Feed it back to buying. Every dead SKU is a note to next season: this colour, this size curve, this price didn't land. Dead stock is expensive tuition, so at least keep the lesson.

None of this needs a data-science team. It needs the dead list sitting in front of the person who buys and the person who allocates, every week, before the markdown clock runs down.

Dead stock is the one inventory problem you can almost always catch in time, provided you're measuring the right thing. Age tells you what's old. Sell-through tells you what's dead. And the gap between those two, caught in week six instead of at end-of-season review, is the gap between a quiet transfer and a painful write-down.