I'm not going to name the brands I dropped. That's not fair to them — some of them have improved, some of them serve different customers well, and some of them just weren't right for my shop. But I can talk in general terms about what got pulled and why, because the patterns are useful for anyone running a similar business.
First brand I tried and dropped: a midwestern boot brand that pitched me hard in 2019. Rep came in with samples, pricing was good, made-in-USA story was strong, the boots looked the part. I bought a small order — three styles, two sizes each. They sat on the shelf for fourteen months. Customers picked them up, looked at them, set them down, bought a Thorogood instead. Eventually I marked them down 40% and cleared them. The boots were fine. They were just not what my customers wanted, and I should have known that before I bought them.
Lesson: my customers buy what they've heard of. Brand recognition is a real factor in workwear in a way that it isn't in some retail categories. A guy is buying a boot to wear for two years on a job site. He doesn't want to experiment with a brand none of his crew has heard of.
Second brand I dropped: a glove company that made what looked like a great glove but had no pricing discipline. I'd buy at one wholesale price, then six weeks later they'd offer a big-box retailer the same glove at a price that undercut my retail. Couldn't compete. Dropped the brand within nine months.
"When a customer-facing failure point is in the product, the cost of dropping the brand is one inventory cycle. The cost of keeping it is the relationship with every customer who buys it."
Lesson: if a wholesaler is also selling to your competitors at prices that beat your retail, they don't actually want a healthy independent retail channel. They want a transactional channel. That's a brand to walk away from.
Third brand I dropped: a hi-vis brand whose reflective tape I tested for myself and found degraded faster than competing brands at the same price point. I sold one round of inventory, watched customers come back complaining about the tape after 20 washes, and didn't reorder. Refunded the complaining customers without making them argue.
Lesson: when a customer-facing failure point is in the product, the cost of dropping the brand is one inventory cycle. The cost of keeping it is the relationship with every customer who buys it.
What I keep on the shelf, in general: brands my customers ask for by name, brands that have a service-and-warranty story, brands that don't undercut me on price. That filter has gotten me to about eighteen active brands across boots, gloves, hi-vis, pants, jackets, and accessories.
I still take rep meetings. Most of them I pass on. Every once in a while one fits and I add it to the floor. The shelf has limited real estate. Every brand that earns shelf space is taking shelf space from another brand. That's the actual decision.