A household cleaning brand we worked with last autumn listed a 200 ml trial pack at CU and GS25. Weekly sell-through looked excellent—top quartile in the chain's household subcategory. The brand team wanted to expand facings before Chuseok.
We rebuilt the velocity chart using gross margin per facing week instead of raw units. The trial pack ranked eleventh of fourteen SKUs. Its promo dependency was 68% of volume, and post-promo weeks fell below the chain's automatic reorder threshold twice in twelve weeks.
The buyer meeting went differently than the brand expected. They kept the SKU but rejected additional facings and asked for a margin-neutral pack architecture instead.
Three checks we apply before trusting convenience velocity
- Normalize by facing count — A SKU with double facings will always look faster than an equal performer with one facing.
- Strip promo weeks — Convenience chains rotate short bursts frequently. Base velocity matters for reorder logic.
- Compare margin per linear centimetre — Buyers increasingly ask for this even if they do not publish the metric.
None of this requires new software. It requires aligned sell-out files and honest footnotes on every chart you present upstream.