Hi-vis is the most boring category in the store. Yellow t-shirts, yellow vests, occasionally orange. There's no romance to it, there's no story, there's no fitting nuance. I underweighted it for the first 14 months. That was a mistake.
What I got wrong was assuming hi-vis was an afterthought purchase. Customers come in for boots and walk out with a hi-vis t-shirt as an add-on, right? Wrong. Maybe a quarter of customers do that. The other three-quarters come in specifically for hi-vis. They burned through their last shirt, they need a Class 3 instead of a Class 2 for a new contract, the foreman changed the color requirement, the reflective tape on their old vest peeled. Hi-vis is a primary purchase for a lot of guys, not an add-on.
What that meant practically. I was running out of common sizes (L and XL especially) within a week of restocking. I was understocking Class 3 because I assumed Class 2 was the volume seller. I had three colors when I needed seven (yellow-green, hi-vis orange, and the various two-tone configurations).
I overhauled hi-vis in month 16 of the shop. I tripled the SKU count, doubled the size range, added three brand options instead of just Carhartt. Sales in that category quadrupled within four months. It wasn't that customers had been wanting more hi-vis — they'd been buying hi-vis somewhere else because I didn't have what they needed.
Other things I got wrong about hi-vis specifically:
1. Class 3 long-sleeve is summer gear, not just winter gear. Construction guys working flag-traffic in 95-degree weather still need Class 3. The breathable Class 3 long-sleeve options are a real category. I'd been treating long-sleeve as a winter-only buy.
2. Reflective tape quality is not all the same. The cheap retroreflective tape on $14 generic t-shirts cracks within 20 washes. The high-quality tape on $30 Carhartt shirts goes 50+ washes. Customers don't always know this and assume the tape is the same. I started telling them.
3. Hi-vis hoodies and jackets are a separate market. They're not the same customer as hi-vis t-shirts. Hi-vis hoodies sell to highway and night-shift workers; hi-vis t-shirts sell across all trades. I'd been treating them as one category. Splitting them helped me understock and overstock more accurately.
4. The 'class' on the tag matters more than the brand. Customers sometimes care about brand. Their foreman almost always cares about class. If it's not the right class for the contract, the brand doesn't matter at all.
Hi-vis is still the most boring category in the store. But it's a top-three revenue category now. I was wrong to underweight it.