Five hundred moulding profiles that don't move. Forty years of stock, sitting in racks, costing you money every day it stays there. Here is how we turn it into cash without touching the brands you're building.
Inventory carrying cost runs 20–30% of value per year: warehousing, handling, insurance, and above all the capital tied up in it. On a $2M cost basis, that's $400k–$600k every year quietly leaving the business.
That's not stock you're holding. It's the Wall Art Lane launch, the retail fit-out, and the advertising budget, locked in a rack.
The mouldings aren't worthless. They're worth $3–5M at retail. The issue is that every channel you currently own is the wrong shape for them.
Posters & Canvas sells finished consumer product at everyday prices. Wall Art Lane is about to launch as a premium, made-to-order brand. Neither is built to move 500 discontinued profiles, and forcing it through either one does real damage.
Timber moulding has one great advantage over almost every other kind of dead stock: it doesn't perish and it doesn't date. That means you don't have to panic-dump it. You can run a patient, controlled sell-through and recover far more.
Bulk buyout or auction. Quick and final, but you leave most of the value on the table.
Targeted trade clearance plus finished consumer product. Slower, materially more recovered.
The difference between those two rows, on a $2M cost basis, is roughly $800,000.
It would have been the fast option. It's also the one that quietly costs you the most, and I'd rather tell you that now than after we've built it.
Everything runs off a single Shopify stock pool, so a length sold to a framer in Perth instantly disappears from the consumer outlet. No overselling, no reconciliation, no spreadsheets.
A login-gated catalogue selling raw discontinued mouldings to the trade as coherent single-profile job lots, condition-graded A to D, at 60–80% off. This is your fastest cash and your highest recovery per hour of effort, because you already have these relationships.
Dead moulding is worth nothing to a consumer. A finished, framed artwork is worth a lot. We pair the dead profiles with your existing print library and sell them as finished pieces: last-chance collections, one-of-a-kind numbered drops, mystery frame boxes, gallery-wall bundles. Real scarcity, honestly told, because it's true.
Whatever the trade and the outlet don't absorb goes to bulk buyers or timber auction. You accept 20–40% for speed and finality, and you get the rack space and the capital back. This runs last, not first, which is exactly why it's small.
The order matters more than anything else in this proposal. You extract from the best channels first, and only the leftovers ever see a discount bin.
Grade and catalogue the 500 profiles. Build the gated B2B catalogue. Price as single-profile job lots. Push to your existing trade list, the Picture Framers Guild, and the trade forums. Cash starts moving in week three.
New brand, new storefront. Convert dead moulding into finished framed product using your print library. Run the drops. Markdowns step down only when a profile misses its sell-through target, never on a fixed calendar.
Bulk or auction whatever remains. Rack space back, capital back, vault empty.
The same reporting that tracks recovery also flags the next profile going quiet, twelve months before it becomes dead stock. You don't repeat this in 2036.
Pick the scope that matches your appetite. Every option is fixed-price for what's listed, so there are no surprises.
These are recovery rates against cost, not retail. Anyone quoting you a percentage of retail is selling you something.
| Channel | Recovery on cost | On $2M basis | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trade clearance (managed) | 40–70% | $800k–$1.4M | Weeks |
| Outlet, finished product | 50–80% | $1M–$1.6M | Months |
| Bulk buyout / auction | 20–40% | $400k–$800k | Days |
| Doing nothing | −25%/yr | −$500k/yr | Ongoing |
A blended program run in this order should recover materially more than a single fire sale, and it stops the annual bleed. The figures above are industry benchmarks, not guarantees. Actual recovery depends on profile desirability, condition, and how patiently we run the sell-through. I'd rather set that expectation now than oversell you a number.
This whole plan depends on discipline. If we get tempted to shortcut any of these, the program stops working.
The clearance brand never touches Posters & Canvas or Wall Art Lane. Different name, different domain, different customer.
Positioned as a one-time vault clearing, because that's what it is. Nothing to wait for, so no one waits.
Your deepest discounts sit behind a login and are never visible to a consumer.
Every stock count and every timer is tied to real stock and real deadlines. Fake urgency is illegal and it poisons trust permanently.
The first move is small: get eyes on the 500 profiles, grade the condition, and see what's genuinely sellable to the trade versus what's only good for finished product. That gives us real numbers instead of estimates, and it's the foundation for everything else.
One note on timing: I want Wall Art Lane live and selling before we start this. That's the project that's already paid for and already in flight, and it deserves a clean run at the finish line. The vault isn't going anywhere.