Your first big retail launch: where the cash goes in the first six months
15 min read
Landing Target or Ulta is a huge win.
For your cash, though, it’s the starting line, not the finish line.
A big retail launch is a cash event before it’s a revenue event. Money goes out in stages, months before any comes back. And when it does come back, chargebacks and deductions have often come off the top.
In this guide, I’ll follow the cash through your first six months, stage by stage:
- What do you pay before the first unit sells?
- How long is the gap between paying suppliers and getting paid?
- What are chargebacks in retail, and why is your first payment smaller than your invoice?
- Why does the reorder cost you cash before the launch has paid back?
- How much cash does a 600-door launch really tie up?
- What should you track every week?
Target Beauty Studio opened on September 10 in more than 600 stores, with about 90 brands. More than two-thirds of them are new to Target.[1] That’s almost exactly the size of the launch in this guide.
If you launched in Target Beauty Studio or at Ulta this fall, this is happening to you now. Between November and January, the first reorder is due, the first payments arrive smaller than your invoices, and you start paying for price cuts on slow sellers.
I see this pattern with the beauty brands I work with. And it starts before you’ve sold a thing.