Sports & Outdoors
Season-end kit is a cash decision, not a margin decision.
Technical gear, apparel and seasonal equipment sit in one catalogue and behave nothing alike. When the season closes, the remaining stock changes job.
Why this changes the advertising decision
What is different here isn't the channel. It's the economics underneath it.
Seasonal kit has a hard end date
Once the season closes, unsold stock is capital waiting for next year.
Technical products are researched, apparel is impulse
The two need different consideration windows and different targets.
Size and spec fragmentation is heavy
Availability at variant level decides whether spend converts or bounces.
What we do about it
The execution follows the economics, not the other way round.
Season close triggers a review
Remaining stock is moved to a cash objective with a contribution floor rather than discounted indefinitely.
Technical and apparel are funded separately
Each runs against its own buying behaviour rather than a blended account target.
Evidence
£520k+
UK Soccer Shop
Gross cash recovered from ageing stock across a 45-day recovery programme.
Sports retail with a very large catalogue, where season-end stock changed job from margin to cash.
- Challenge
- Aged stock past 90 days was being bought at full-margin targets when its real commercial job was cash recovery.
- What we changed
- SKUs mapped by stock age, margin and competitive pressure, segmented with custom labels and moved to cash-recovery rules.
- Period
- A 45-day aged-stock recovery programme, against the preceding equivalent period.
- Basis
- Cash released from ageing stock, not contribution, not profit and not ad spend saved. Turnover measured on the client's own inventory reporting.
- Source
- Client-reported from their finance data.
The Method - BOI®
How BOI® applies here.
The problem
Technical gear, apparel and seasonal kit serve different buyers, and one ROAS target blends all three.
The BOI® answer
Technical hero kit runs as Scale. Apparel runs as Profit. Season-end stock runs as Recovery.
Worth reading next
Next step
We'll tell you what your account is doing to your sports & outdoors margin.
A commercial review reads your account against your own product economics, and tells you where the next pound should go. Brands we work with typically spend around £10k a month on Google Ads, but that is guidance, not a gate. If you are below it and the question is real, ask anyway.
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