Pondering inventory mangement in the age of the web.
Lands' End is having a sale on swimwear, and the structure of the sale is kind of interesting. Nearly everything has a big discount (65% off or so), and they're pretty clearly trying to sell off all of their inventory. (Apparently their southern-hemisphere seasonal demand isn't enough to justify year-round inventory.)
The interesting part is how they're pruning items from the display: As inventory on an item goes away, it stops showing up in searches. Along the same lines, the sizes and colors available don't list all the possibilities that (presumably) existed pre-sale. The end result (presumably) is that they'll be able to sell off nearly all of their inventory, without making a lot of user-visible changes. (It's a bit odd that a search for bikini tops yields only one result, but this is presumably nearing the end of the sale.
Not quite as big an adaptation as the demand-management computer manufacturers do (free upgrades from components that they're short of), but still pretty cool.
The interesting part is how they're pruning items from the display: As inventory on an item goes away, it stops showing up in searches. Along the same lines, the sizes and colors available don't list all the possibilities that (presumably) existed pre-sale. The end result (presumably) is that they'll be able to sell off nearly all of their inventory, without making a lot of user-visible changes. (It's a bit odd that a search for bikini tops yields only one result, but this is presumably nearing the end of the sale.
Not quite as big an adaptation as the demand-management computer manufacturers do (free upgrades from components that they're short of), but still pretty cool.