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How inventory management became my entire waking life

My job is a lot harder than it used to be. Since I’m a business owner and a workaholic, my job is my life, ergo my life is a lot harder than it used to be.

If that seems very dramatic, I want to remind you of a few things: 1) expressing my emotions helps me process them and is part of my journey toward emotional wellbeing 2) it’s part of my creative BeadKwe persona 3) this is a blog post and I’m therefore allowed some dramatic license. I not claiming that I’m uniquely experiencing a harder life. I think it’s probably true for most beings on this earth in this moment. There’s a pandemic. There’s climate change. The constant barrage of notifications makes us angsty.

I digress. There’s a particular issue that has made my job/life so difficult since March 2020: supply chain.

Many readers are probably sick of hearing those two words. I don’t blame you. Unless you worked in supply chain previously, in food, retail, logistics, purchasing, etc, it probably wasn’t something you thought about a lot. Products were there on the shelf for you to buy. Menu items were available. If you worked in a tribal government or university, you could just call your purchasing department or use your departmental purchasing card to get the office supplies, furniture, beads, you needed. It was great. It was so simple; you didn’t even see what was there. You saw the final product as the final consumer; you didn’t see the vast web and work behind it.

Until now.

I understand that it must be quite shocking. If you don’t want to hear more about it, quit reading now. I’ll write a happier blog post in future. One about my dog, or something. Check back for that. If you are interested specifically in the bead supply chain, keep reading.

I’ve been selling beads for about ten years now. I started this business because I finished college during a recession and couldn’t find work. I tried to sell beadwork for a while but ran into a few problems. Firstly, I struggle to finish projects (a topic worthy of multiple future posts). Secondly, I struggled to find a consistent source of supplies online. I figured I wasn’t the only one with the second problem and started writing a business plan for what would become Bead & Powwow Supply.

Inventory management has always presented a plethora of challenges. I find it quite enjoyable as a problem-solving exercise. I could write a whole series on different aspects of it: presentation, storage, inventory checks and counts, POS and ecommerce, prep, assembly, purchasing strategy, keeping up with fashion trends, and so much more. Of all these there was something I used to take for granted: availability. There were beads. I decided what to order. I ordered. Most arrived. I tied them into hanks, labeled them, processed the invoice into my software, and sold them. Sure, some items got discontinued: Cheyenne Pink, Coral Red. Sure, there was a summer when Opaque Black and White 11/0 Seed Beads and 9/0 3-cuts were SCARCE. That wasn’t fun but it was manageable. One or two or even 7 colors out of stock couldn’t make a huge dint when there’s 200+ colors in a product line.

Then March 2020 happened. For several weeks, I had to contact each vendor before placing an order, to see if they were shipping out. Different regions had different lockdown rules and some wholesalers couldn’t ship out for a while. Others were but were limited to just one or two staff. I had been in NYC in early March, doing business in the fashion district. I waited until July to receive four boxes of beads. The warehouse owner had gone home when I left that day in March, and that turned out to be the last day he could go to his business until midsummer.

This was combined with a huge surge in orders. I was singlehandedly shipping out all orders from powwowsupply.com and we saw an increase of at least tenfold. I had to redo my shipping routine to accommodate. The pickup bin was full nearly every day. This made a perfect storm for inventory management. Beads were flying off the shelf but only trickling back on.

One day in June 2020, I stood for a moment in front of the shelves of 11/0 Seed Beads. That’s the biggest section in our warehouse. Several shelves lined with cardboard bins, usually full or mostly full of beads. At least half the bins were empty. I cried.

After a staff meeting, we made some changes. We removed most bead sets from our site. We couldn’t consistently stock all the components, especially in one particularly large (and popular) set. Part of profitability is minimizing the time spent on each order. Efficiency is key; streamline the shopping, the packing, the shipping and one person (often me) can ship out many orders or take a day off. When we must spend five, ten, or twenty minutes searching for beads, confirming they’re out of stock and making substitutions/refunds, then we’re no longer efficient and cost-effective. We also quit offering special order bulk beads. We could no longer be confident that we would receive the item customers wanted. Our vendors were swamped, overworked, and understaffed, so we quit reaching out to find out if items were on hand.

I went about systematically trying to replenish the inventory. I’ve spent over a year doing that, to mixed success. Except for an eight week pause while we moved warehouse and home in summer 2021, we usually receive bead shipments every week or so. Even so, it’s been hard to keep shelves full. While we’ve adjusted to demand, our vendors have been running low. Remember, the pandemic didn’t just disrupt stores, it disrupted manufacturing and the supply chain points before that, i.e., raw materials. Global logistics has been disrupted. Container ships have been sitting in port or quarantined if they weren’t stuck in canals.

We live in a world of computers and technology and it’s easy to forget that humans are behind all of that. Sure, you can order beads on a website. But those beads must be taken down from a shelf and put in a box by a human. Shipping labels are printed and attached by humans. A human picks up the package and several humans help it get to its destination. Before you even shop, a human has taken that photo you see on the site, written the description, tied the hank, labeled the beads (a process which involves assigning a SKU, a name, creating a label, printing it, sticking it to a tag, and attaching the tag to the hank), shelved the beads, shipped the beads, warehoused the beads, cataloged the beads, bagged the beads, strung the beads, made the beads, mixed the materials to make the beads, calculated the materials, ordered them, shipped them, dug them out of the ground.

Still more people helped those people do their jobs. Somebody runs payroll, somebody does sales, someone does research and development, someone does acquisitions. Other people deliver food and drive trucks, assemble cardboard boxes and shelves. Somebody sells coffee to the workers on their way to Bead & Powwow Supply, our vendors, their contractors, the shipping company, the manufacturer, the raw materials supplier. What looks like a simple online transaction is just the face of a huge network of people, each doing one small part of a huge job.

The pandemic forced an implosion in that system. Any time that two or more people met, they could possibly transmit the virus. All those points suddenly slowed. Simple tasks take longer as we learn and must remind ourselves of social distancing, of masking, of the importance of mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual wellbeing.

Lots of business owners have complained about public health measures. They say (or write in all caps) that restrictions and rules implemented to protect public health are ruining business, the economy, the country. I’m not one of those and honestly, I wish those complainers would shut up. It’s been confusing, and sometimes, I’ve had to search hard for reliable information/best practices. I wish the State of Michigan small business resources were more forthcoming with support and info. But I know that these are meant to protect public health. I love beads and I love my business. But neither are worth risking a life for. I’ve been very cautious. I have never lifted our workplace mask mandate. I decided not to set up at powwows in 2021. We’ve only been at our community farmer’s market, which is outside, and hosted our own small pop-up, where masks were required. I don’t want to die or get sick for beads. I don’t love them that much. I don’t want to risk transmission to my staff or customers. My community has suffered tremendous loss, I will not contribute to us losing more. We’ll continue selling online and occasionally in-person within the Isabella Indian Reservation for the foreseeable future.

In any case, I’m only a retailer. I can’t control the supply chain that I’m linked to. I’m continuing to try to replenish my shelves, buy strategically, and sell strategically. I spent the day before Thanksgiving ordering 11/0 Seed Beads. I spent the day after ordering 13/0 Seed Beads, processing in a small shipment of 11/0s, and putting 12/0s on sale for Small Business Saturday. I’m hoping we can fill bins back up.

In the meantime, we’re being strategic with sales. Instead of sitewide discounts for holidays and into 2022, you can expect to see select categories and items marked down. We’re discounting items we have well-stocked and can get more of. We’d hate to slash an item, sell out, only to not be able to restock it indefinitely. We want to be able to supply you in the future, so that you can finish your beautiful projects.

27th Nov 2021 Ellie Mitchell (Saginaw Ojibwe; Eagle Clan)

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