A twelve-month buying calendar for a reference-chart category

Treat charts as a refill category and the calendar gets simple. Treat them as a seasonal bet and you will spend every January discounting what you bought in October. Both approaches are visible in our order book, and only one of them reorders predictably.

The shape of the year

Chart buying runs about six weeks ahead of the customer. Gift-led demand concentrates in November and December, which means your stock has to be on the wall by early October. New-home and redecoration demand is strongest in spring, so the second replenishment lands in March rather than May. Museum and school accounts run to their own academic calendar and usually commit earlier in the year.

A working schedule

1. January — review what sold in the gift period. Cut the two worst performers, keep the winners as permanent lines.
2. February — place the spring replenishment on your top three SKUs plus one experimental piece.
3. March to May — spring selling. Do not reorder mid-season unless you are genuinely out.
4. June — commit to the autumn anchor piece, which needs the longest lead time.
5. July to September — receive and hang. This is when the wall gets rearranged, not in December.
6. October — final top-up, sized so that leftovers are a rounding error rather than a pallet.
7. November to December — sell. No new arrivals after the first week of November.

What the calendar protects you from

Two failures account for most dead chart stock: ordering gift quantities for a non-gift range in spring, and ordering spring quantities for the gift period. Both are timing mistakes, not buying mistakes, and both are avoided by working six weeks ahead of the customer rather than reacting to last week.

One more rule that pays for itself: never let a seasonal display run past the season. A wall that still shows last winter in February tells a returning customer that nothing has changed, which costs more than the markdown you avoided.