One Section, Read Properly

What was wrong

Natural history is one of the store’s defining sections. The store sits between a national park and a strait, and customers drive in looking for everything from lichens and shorebirds to salmon, fungi, forests, and regional ecology. But the section was running on shelf memory. No one could say which titles were actually selling, which standards of the backlist had quietly disappeared from the shelf, or which spine-out inventory had been sitting for two years. The expertise was real. The information wasn’t.

What I did

I built a map of what the section should be: about 1,500 titles across thirteen naturalist themes, from field guides and regional natural history to nature writing and ecology, tiered from must-stock to nice-to-have on the basis of award history, sales velocity, and fit with the store’s customers. Then I matched that map against the store’s actual inventory records, new and used.

Every title got a velocity score, one number that combines recency, this year’s sales, and lifetime history, so a buyer can sort a theme and see at a glance what’s earning its shelf space.

The output wasn’t a report. It was eighteen working workbooks, one for each of the thirteen themes, four for the science and math shelves, and one for the natural-history backbone of the section, each with a keep / reorder / cull / add column the buyer could act on directly, plus a refresh that keeps the whole thing current as new sales come in.

Birds Workbook 1 of 18 · sample rows

Keep 61 Reorder 23 Cull 9 Add 14 rows from all four tabs

Title	On hand	On order	Sold YTD	Lifetime	Last sold	Velocity	Action
The Sibley Guide to Birds, 2nd ed. David Allen Sibley Tier 1 · must stock	1	2	9	64	Oct 2	91 Q1	Keep
Birds of the Pacific Northwest John Shewey & Tim Blount Tier 1 · must stock	3	0	7	41	Sep 28	84 Q1	Keep
What the Robin Knows Jon Young Tier 1 · must stock	0	0	2	18	Jun 3	58 Q2	Reorder Priority A
The Bird Way Jennifer Ackerman Tier 2 · strong	0	0	4	23	Aug 14	71 Q2	Reorder Priority B
Sibley Birds West David Allen Sibley Tier 1 · must stock	—	—	—	—	never stocked	—	Add
The Sibley Guide to Birds, 1st ed. David Allen Sibley Superseded	2	0	0	31	Mar 2024	7 Q5	Cull Returnable

Velocity is recency, this year’s sales, and lifetime sales in one number, ranked Q1–Q5 Refreshed from the POS export each week

Then the same curation went outward. The “Field Guide to Field Guides” series turns each theme’s decisions into a printed buying guide, with a decision matrix and staff picks, that customers take home.

For the technically curious: a Python matching pipeline against more than 110,000 inventory records, new and used, with an automated match rate over 90% on new books. The rest was resolved by hand, which is where the bookseller judgment lives.

What changed

The first reorder pass surfaced more than 400 backlist titles the plan called for and the shelf didn’t have, nearly fifty of them must-stock: books the store would have said it carried, and didn’t. Dead stock came off the shelf and the section’s depth became visible again. Staff knowledge that used to live in conversation is now a printed guide customers walk out with.

We’re measuring sell-through and buyer time saved over the next two quarters. Those numbers will appear here as they mature, not before.

Could I do that for you?

This engagement repeats for any section where your store has real expertise. That’s the point of it. The Inventory Intelligence Review is the small version: one section, your POS data, a velocity-scored read on what’s selling, what’s missing, and what’s dead, delivered as worksheets your buyer can act on the same week.

Start with a 20-minute conversation