Sellout Velocity Is Lying to You

By Nick Gray | Founder & CEO, IGU Global

I couldn't tell you how many product launches I've done. Whether it was with Adidas, Nike, Sneakerboy, there’s twenty plus years of them but what I can tell you is the focus was always the same every single time. The shoe. The product. The thing in the box. That's what the meetings were always about, that's what the deck was about and that's what everyone in these rooms believed they were building.

The bit nobody says out loud is that the shoe was never the point.

I remember standing in conversations when The Ten dropped some time ago and I've never seen it more clearly than that night. The line was the point, the wait was the point, not knowing if you'd get them was the point and every person standing out there in that line knew the box would never feel like the queue felt.

Retail has been running a wanting machine for forty years and calling it desire.

Nearly every mechanic this industry treats as craft is the same mechanic underneath. It’s the drop, the waitlist, that raffle, notify me, the countdown and all of it engineered to hold people in anticipation. Why, because anticipation is where the feeling lives, not the purchase, the purchase is actually the end of the feeling in many cases.

There is neuroscience under this and it's worth us spending thirty seconds on it. Firstly dopamine isn't the pleasure chemical, it's the wanting chemical. They are two separate systems which researchers pulled apart decades ago. Wanting is what drives you toward the thing and liking is what happens when you get it. Turn wanting all the way up and you get someone who moves faster, works harder, resists distraction, and enjoys the reward exactly as much as they did before. More wanting, not more enjoying.

We found this out on the retail floor long before anyone gave it a name and then we optimised entirely for wanting and believe me its the half you can sell twice.

At Sneakerboy we knew the line outside was worth more than the product inside and I've written about this before and I meant it as a compliment to the culture. However I do have to say I'm less sure now. That line was doing something for the business that the product couldn't do, and back then we never once asked what would happen if the line stopped forming.

I've also done more Jordan launches than I can count over the years and I have to say a lot blurred and looked the same over time. The line formed and it always formed but it often wasn't because of anything we'd built, not the work or the campaign even, just because it was a Jordan and that's just what happened when a Jordan dropped. It was just due process, really. We turned up, the queue was there, the shoes went, everybody went home and we called it a great day.

Nobody ever asked what we'd actually contributed to that line and the honest truth most of the time it’s nothing. We were really collecting on wanting somebody else built two decades earlier, and reporting it as if we'd made it that morning.

Here's the part nobody's costing up.

The thing with wanting is it always resets and that's the entire design and game. Anticipation spikes, the thing arrives and the system then drops back to baseline and baseline is exactly where it started. So what we find is often that next drop then has to be scarcer, the next release louder and the next mechanic even tighter. I hate to say it but that's not brand building, that's just tolerance, and it's why hype brands often have a half life and heritage brands don't.

Wanting is rented and we have to get that very clear, it’s liking you own and you pay for it every single cycle, the price goes up every cycle, and the moment you stop paying it's gone and it always takes the number with it. 

And this is where it gets expensive, because not many in retail measure the two as separate things.

Conversion. Repeat rate. AOV. Sell-through velocity. NPS. Every one of these collapses wanting and liking into one single figure and then gets read as brand health. A drop or release that sells out in ninety seconds and a customer who's been buying quietly for nine years produce the same looking revenue line but are  completely different assets. One is a transaction with good marketing on it and the other is a relationship. Your P&L can’t tell you which one you just booked though.

Sellout velocity is a wanting metric being reported as a liking metric. It's also, in most businesses I walk into, the single most trusted number in the room. Which makes the machine self-reinforcing. It looks like it's working right up until it isn't, and by the time it isn't, the mechanic has escalated three times and everyone in the company has read the escalation as momentum. So we have to separate them. There's three things, and any merchandise director can run all of them from next week.

The first is baseline purchase. Just strip out every drop, every countdown, every scarcity window, every retargeted email, and just look at what's left. What do people buy from you when nothing is pushing them? That is your liking number and I'd have a guess you've never isolated it, why, because it lives underneath the campaign layer and nobody's ever had a reason to dig it out before. It's usually smaller than people expect too and that's the whole point of looking.

The second is the unprompted second purchase. Not the one you triggered. Not the one you discounted into existence but the one where somebody came back on their own, with no mechanic in the way, because they wanted the thing rather than the getting of it. Measure the ratio of prompted to unprompted and you now have a live read on which system you're actually running.

Ok, third is what happens when you go quiet. Most brands never test this because going quiet feels like losing right. Pick a window, kill the mechanics, and watch who's still there. That's your real customer base, everything above that line is rented.

Let's be clear here, none of this makes wanting the villain. Wanting is the entry point and always has been and the line outside is real, the anticipation is real, and a brand with no capacity to make anyone want anything is a brand nobody notices.

The failure is treating the entry point as the whole relationship.

Trust is what the liking side looks like when it's working and it doesn't spike. It never gives you a ninety second sellout or a screenshot worth posting. Which is precisely why it doesn't crash, and precisely why it's invisible on the dashboard you're using to decide what to do next.

So here's the thing I can't answer for you though. Every brand I've worked with can tell me their sell-through in about four seconds, not one of them could tell me how many people bought without being wanted at. 

Your dashboard measures what people did.

It doesn't tell you why they did it.

Until it can separate wanting from liking, it can't tell you whether you're building demand...

or just borrowing it.

Most brands can report their sellout speed to the decimal. Almost none can tell you whether anyone actually likes them. That second question is the one SOMA was built to answer.

Book a 30-min Clarity Call →

Common Questions :

What is sellout velocity?

How fast a product sells through after it drops. Retail reads it as proof of brand strength. It's actually proof of demand engineering and how well you built the wanting, not whether anyone likes you.

What's the difference between wanting and liking?

They're separate systems. Wanting is anticipation, so the drop, the scarcity, the countdown. Liking is the experience and what's left after it. You can drive one to record levels while the other quietly dies.

How do you measure whether customers actually like a brand?

Full-price repeat purchase without mechanics. Retention after the hype window closes. What happens when you go quiet. If demand only shows up when you manufacture urgency, it was never liking.