Brand Deals, Sponsorship & Business
Dead stock
Also called: unsold inventory, inventory risk
Physical products get bought before they get sold. Order 500 hoodies, sell 180, and the remaining 320 are dead stock: money already spent, sitting in a box, costing storage and losing value every month as the design dates. For a creator merch line the risk is sharper than for an ordinary retailer. Designs are tied to a moment, a video or a running joke that stops being current.
Print on demand and pre-order runs exist to move that risk off you, at the cost of margin per unit and slower delivery. The arithmetic worth doing before any drop is what happens if you sell a quarter of what you expect, because the plan has to survive that number.