Ask any retailer which SKU in the men's aisle they are most often out of, and the answer is blade refills. Ask them which SKU they reorder most often, and it is the same answer. Those two facts are connected.
Why refills behave differently
A razor handle is a once-every-few-years purchase. A refill pack is a consumable on a four-to-eight-week cycle, and the shopper is locked into a specific cartridge system. They will not substitute. If the four-count of their system is missing, they do not buy the eight-count of another one — they leave.
That makes refills the highest-consequence out-of-stock in the bay. It also makes them the most theft-prone item on the shelf, which is why so many retailers put them behind the counter or in a locking strip, and why the shelf count and the system count drift apart faster here than anywhere else in the set.
Sizing the order
The mistake is ordering refills against handle sales. Handles sell in a trickle; refills sell against your installed base, which is every customer who has ever bought that handle from anyone. The installed base only grows.
A workable rule for an independent store:
- Count your refill units sold over the last full quarter, per cartridge system.
- Divide by 13 to get a weekly rate.
- Hold four weeks of cover on your top two systems, and two weeks on the rest.
- Round up to case pack. Refill cases are small; the rounding costs very little.
If a system falls below roughly three units a week, it is not earning its facing — drop it and give the space to the two that are moving. A men's set with five cartridge systems on it is usually carrying two that exist for one customer each.
Why they ship in full cases
We split case packs on most of the line card, but not on blade refills. The inner packs are sealed at the factory and carry the security tagging; opening the case to pick four units breaks that, and it also breaks the audit trail that makes a claim straightforward if a case turns up light. It is one of two exceptions we hold to — aerosol body spray is the other — and the pricelist marks every SKU either way.
What to take away
- Order refills against your installed base of handles, not against handle sales.
- Four weeks of cover on the top two cartridge systems, two weeks on the rest.
- Drop any system selling under about three units a week and re-face the space.
- Refills ship in full cases — the inner packs are factory-sealed and security-tagged.
Shave, blades and post-shave is 2,650 SKUs on our line card, and refills are the part of it we hold deepest. Orders confirmed by 1 PM MT leave the same business day, which for most of the lower 48 means a shelf that was empty on Monday is full again on Wednesday.