 Hello and thanks for reading my article in this month's Envision Magazine. As promised, I wanted to review some of the most popular and effective methods that I've worked in other independent opticals for moving out discontinued inventory. So let's get started with the most traditional methods. Many of you will discontinue a frame brand and the only thing that really changes is that once that frame style sells, you guys just won't reorder it, right? No discounts, no incentives. Now I get why this is popular to do this. You don't want to lose out on profitability that you're supposed to be making on those frames. However, this is a big no-no in retail 101 and a perfect example of tripping over dollars to pick up pennies. Now think of your optical as real estate and each frame spot in your optical as a rental property. Now the reason you even decided to discontinue these brands in the first place is because they were not selling like you would like. Essentially they weren't paying their rent. So now that rental space is still there even though you've decided that you're evicting that brand. And another brand can't move into that space until the discontinued brand gets the heck out of there. But many times in optical we hold on to discontinued brands for way longer than we need to because we don't want to discount them and lose out on that profitability that we could have made. So we let the discontinued brand essentially become a squatter and that's simply not earning their keep because they're not earning that spot and they're allowed to hang around. So no more of that. Let's get those discontinued brands out of there. Now hopefully you see how vital it is to get those discontinued frames moved. So when opticals do decide to finally discount frames it's often moved to the darkest corner of the optical and forgotten about mainly because it's not exciting to sell those brands when there's other fun and exciting brands to sell. But offices that discount those discontinued brands and then promote a closeout sale to their patient base is really, really beneficial. So maybe you decide to promote a brand closeout sale on your social media or maybe you send out an email blast or two. And remember when you set up a closeout sale you get to set the parameters. So maybe you decide that there are no warranties on the closeout frames or maybe that there are no guaranteed parts of replacements for the brands that are purchased in the closeout. Other offices decide to add these frames as a part of their value package. That package that allows for them to compete on price to keep patients from walking and going somewhere else that's perceived as cheaper. So some create a deal with the closeout frames where you charge your usual and customary for lenses and then include the closeout frame at no cost. For the frames that might be very expensive that you're discontinuing you can do something similar and say that you know you have the usual and customary on the lenses but you get a $300 frame for $90 because it's on closeout. Now remember in both of these scenarios you're accepting less than costs obviously on the frame but understand that because you're selling the lenses with it you have that revenue there to really help a bit to make up you know that revenue and really free up that space to have a new frame which is what we're going for. We want new frames in those spots on our frame boards. If you have an online store through a product like Optify you can send out promotions to your customers and if you have yet to check out the capabilities of a product like Optify this is able to basically sell two patients while they're sitting at home on their couch so you're really missing out on a big opportunity. And last consider utilizing local social media marketplaces to move those closeout frames. For aspexy offices that utilize frame 10 this has been a really effective tool that often brings in new customers that are later converted into patients. So in this scenario you would post the closeout frames to your local community in the marketplaces and sell it as frame only at that closeout price and when the customer pops into the optical to pick up their frames offer to adjust the frames to the patient and make sure to give them a quote for adding lenses and make sure and send them with your contact info too and and and the receipt you want to send them receipt for the frames just let them know that they might need to have the receipt to prove to the people who are making the lenses that the frame was actually purchased at your office and was not a theft. Our opticals that utilize the community marketplaces have reported that a majority of the frame sales that they end up selling on the marketplace end up having lenses made in them there at their office as well. So that's all I have for you this month on moving that discontinued product. So check us out next month in Envision magazine and if you have any questions don't hesitate to reach out. Have a fabulous day.