Inverse of the previous post. There are brands I almost pulled and then stayed with because of something a customer said. Two specifically come to mind.
The first was a heritage American boot brand — I'll keep the name out of it — that wasn't moving in my shop in 2018-19. I was carrying two styles, one of them barely sold, the other sold maybe one pair every six weeks. I was about to pull both styles when a regular customer walked in and said he wanted to buy four pair. Four pair. From the lower-velocity style.
I asked him why four. He said he'd been wearing the same model for fifteen years, every other brand had let him down, and his current pair was about to die. He wanted a backup, a second backup, and one for his son who was starting an apprenticeship.
I sold him the four pairs. Then I asked him to tell me what specifically he liked about that boot, because I clearly hadn't been telling the story right. He spent twenty minutes walking me through it — the leather, the welt construction, the way the heel held up under his particular gait, the resole experience he'd had eight years in.
I changed how I sold that brand the next morning. Instead of just having it on the shelf, I started telling its story to customers who fit its profile. Sales tripled in six months. The brand wasn't the problem. My pitch was the problem.
The second brand I almost pulled was a glove maker whose products felt cheap when I handled them. Stiff, unbroken-in, weird seam placement. I had them in stock and was planning to phase them out at the next reorder.
Then a longtime electrician customer told me the gloves were the best high-dexterity glove he'd ever worn for his specific work — small electrical fittings in tight spaces. He'd been buying them somewhere else because nobody local stocked them. The stiffness I was reading as cheap was actually because the glove was made of a tighter weave that softened up after a week of wear and gave better grip on small fittings than a softer glove would.
I'd been judging the glove with the wrong reference frame. I was a former framer. He was a finish electrician. We need different things from a glove. I kept the brand on the shelf and started sending finish electricians and HVAC guys toward it specifically. Sales doubled within the year.
The lesson from both: I'm not the customer for everything I sell. My instinct about whether a product is good is informed by what I'd buy, which is a narrow slice of what my customers buy. The store works because I have customers in twenty trades, and each trade has its own reference frame. When I'm tempted to pull a brand, the right move is sometimes to ask the customers who buy it what they like about it. Sometimes the answer is 'nothing' and I pull it. Sometimes the answer is twenty minutes of detail that changes what I think.
Both brands are still on the shelf. Both have grown. I'm a worse merchant when I'm just trusting my own instincts. I'm a better one when I'm running them through customers.