Cashmas in July: Turn Q3 Inventory Into Q4 Cash

**Richard Gaffin** (0:00)
And in the course of our conversations, stale inventory and thin cash has come up 600 times. So in other words, like this is not a niche problem. This is like everybody is having this issue. So it becomes really crucial. So let's let's talk then specifically about, OK, if people don't want to just deeply discount everything, which is, I think, a lot of the the issue that people take with doing something like this, what's the approach?
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Hey folks, welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. It's been a little while. I've taken a little break, but I'm back now. Excited to be back in the studio and we got Randall Thompson, who's our VP of GoToMarket here at Common Thread Collective. And Randall's been on with us before, but he's joining us again to talk about a very exciting event that we have going on here at CTC. We're celebrating a brand new holiday. It's called Cashmas in July. And to all those who celebrate, happy Cashmas and we hope you'll join us. But Randall's here to talk through a little bit about what this is, kind of the impetus behind us putting this event together.
And we'll just kind of get into a little bit of your experience to Randall, specifically in your entrepreneurship journey around the necessity of this type of thing. But let that sort of enough kind of like set up. Let's just kind of get into the details of it. So Randall, why don't you talk to us a little bit about what is Cashmas in July?

**Randall Thompson** (2:12)
Yeah, first and foremost, Richard, as you pointed out, the background here is suitable for the topic. I'm kind of trying to go for the warehouse vibe here or the 3PL vibe. But yeah, Cashmas in July, a play on Christmas in July, obviously.
And ultimately, you need to turn cash or you need to turn inventory into cash in Q3 in order to be ready for Q4. So that's kind of the very broad stroke of Cashmas in July.

**Richard Gaffin** (2:39)
Right. And so talk to me a little bit. You mentioned kind of the warehouse aesthetic that you've got going on there. Part of the reason that we were talking about that before is that you had mentioned some of your personal experience again, from when you ran your business around the kind of issue of, particularly if you had your own warehouse, being around inventory that was gathering dusk in the summer doldrum. So talk to me a little bit about that experience and then kind of how that plays into why we've put this together.

**Randall Thompson** (3:12)
Yeah, so 4th of July is kind of like the last event that shows up on your calendar before you get into this lull of Q3.
I've lived the lull of Q3 before and right as Q3 kind of shows up, you're making Q4 bets. You're bringing in an inventory that you're going to hopefully sell in Q4 for a real fat margin. And the whole hypothesis here is that the more cash that you have in Q3, to be able to allocate to those bets in Q4, the bigger the bets you can make, and theoretically, the more money you can make in Q4. And yeah, from personal experience, I've overordered a ton of product before and sat on that product and kind of just twiddled my thumbs and stared at the product. And I always thought to myself, when is the right time to actually turn this into cash? Or do I continue to kind of wait this out and there's going to be some sort of epiphany that hits me on how I can turn this into cash? And that's my experience of it. Q3 is the time to pick a look at your inventory and a lull, pick that inventory, turn it into cash so you can make bigger bets on Q4.