I’ve been doing a fairly thorough stock check recently and it confirmed something I already suspected: I’ve simply got too much stuff.

Over the years Rigu has ended up carrying a very broad range of camera straps, filters and accessories. In some cases that’s useful because it means there’s usually a colour, size or style to suit almost everyone, but there comes a point where having so much choice means quite a lot of money is sitting on the shelves in products that only sell occasionally.

For a small business like Rigu, that isn’t particularly sensible.

One of the slightly awkward things about buying niche photography products is that it’s always a bit of a guessing game. I might find something unusual that I really like and think customers will like too, but there’s no perfect way of knowing in advance whether I should order five of them, twenty of them, or whether one particular colour or size is going to be much more popular than the others. That’s how I end up getting big boxes of stock, because I tend to think the awesome new thing I found is going to fly off the shelves.

Sometimes I get that judgement right, and sometimes I end up looking at a shelf a year or two later and thinking, yes, I definitely ordered too many of those. It’s an annoying feeling, because failure as a stock buyer is very visible, whereas success just makes you feel like you should have ordered even more of them. It’s hard to win.

In many cases it simply means I was a little too optimistic about how many people would want a particular version, or that one colour or size turned out to be much more popular than another.

So I’ve been going through the stock properly and making some decisions about which ranges I want to keep carrying in full, which ones I want to slim down, and which products I’m quite happy to sell through and not replace.

As a result, quite a few more products have now been added to the Clearance section.

That includes a mixture of camera straps such as some Kodak straps, and effects filters, and various other lines where I’ve decided I’m holding more stock than I really need.

There’s nothing wrong with the products and in most cases they aren’t being discontinued by the manufacturer. This is simply me looking at what actually sells at Rigu and trying to make the stock holding a bit more sensible.

Some products are being cleared completely, while with others I’m just cutting down particular colours, sizes or variations that have been sitting around for too long.

I’ve always liked being able to offer a slightly unusual and varied range of photography accessories, so I’m certainly not planning to turn Rigu into a shop selling five products. But I do need to be a bit more disciplined about how much money is tied up in stock that might take years to sell.

The upside for customers is that there are now some genuinely good reductions available, including on products that would normally stay at full price.

As usual with clearance stock, once a particular item, colour or size has gone, I may not be replacing it.

You can see everything currently reduced in the Rigu Clearance section.

And, hopefully, I’ll end up with slightly less stuff staring at me from the stockroom shelves.