By Vince Andrich
Most brand reviews I’ve sat in follow the same pattern.
Someone pulls up a sales report. The team talks about the hero SKU for ten minutes. Someone raises a concern about a new launch. The legacy product nobody wants to kill gets defended by whoever championed it originally. The meeting ends without a single clear decision about what to do with the bottom half of the lineup.
Then it happens again next quarter.
The problem isn’t that founders don’t care about their portfolios. It’s that most brands don’t have a framework for making portfolio decisions. They have opinions. They have history. They have attachment. But they don’t have a clear lens for looking at every product and asking the one question that actually matters: is this SKU compounding the brand or consuming it?
After 25 years making these decisions inside brands like Quest Nutrition, Bang Energy, and JYM Supplement Science, I’ve reduced every portfolio decision to three buckets. Every SKU belongs in one of them.
The Three Buckets
Invest. Fix. Exit.
No gray areas. No “let’s see how it performs next quarter.” Every product in your lineup gets one of these three designations, and every decision that follows flows from that clarity.
Invest
These are the products with real velocity, strong margins, and a consumer who comes back.
Repeat purchase rate is healthy. Velocity per store or per listing is at or above category average. Gross margin holds up across channels, not just blended. The consumer who buys this product understands why they bought it and comes back because it delivered.
These SKUs deserve more. More marketing support. More distribution. More variants where the data supports it. More shelf space in negotiations. More of your team’s creative energy.
The most common mistake I see with Invest SKUs is underinvestment born from portfolio distraction. The hero product is performing well, so the brand assumes it will keep performing without concentrated support and redirects resources toward fixing problem SKUs or launching new ones.
That’s how good brands plateau. The hero SKU that could have become a category anchor instead peaks at a fraction of its potential because the resources it needed went somewhere else.
Fix
These are the products with a real consumer insight but broken execution.
Something about the formula, the format, the price point, the channel, or the messaging is wrong. But underneath the broken execution there is a genuine reason for this product to exist. A real consumer need. A defensible position in the market. A problem it could solve if the commercial architecture around it were rebuilt.
Fix SKUs require an honest diagnosis before any action. The most common Fix mistakes:
Wrong channel: A premium product trying to win at mass when its consumer shops specialty. Or a value product paying DTC acquisition costs it will never recover.
Wrong benefit leading: The product has three real benefits but the one leading the communication is the weakest or least differentiating. The consumer doesn’t understand why they should choose this over the alternative.
Wrong price point: Priced too low to signal quality to its actual buyer, or too high for the channel it’s in. Promo dependence — the pattern where a SKU only moves on deal — is almost always a price architecture problem, not a demand problem.
Wrong format: The product experience is right but the form factor is wrong for how the consumer actually wants to use it.
A Fix SKU is worth the investment of diagnosis. But the diagnosis has to be honest. If the fix requires more resources than the opportunity justifies, it becomes an Exit.
Exit
These are the products consuming resources without compounding the brand.
No amount of promotion, reformulation, or repositioning will change the commercial math. The consumer who would buy this product at a price that makes the business work either does not exist at sufficient scale or is already being served better by a competitor.
Exit SKUs are almost always obvious in retrospect. The challenge is that most brands can see the case for exiting a product clearly and still find reasons not to act on it.
The founder championed the launch. The sales team has accounts carrying it. There’s inventory. There’s tooling. There’s the sense that exiting a product is admitting failure.
None of those are commercial reasons to keep a product alive.
The kindest thing you can do for the rest of your portfolio is let Exit SKUs go. Every dollar of marketing budget, every production run, every inch of warehouse space, every hour of sales team time spent on a structural loser is a dollar, run, inch, and hour not spent on your Invest SKUs.
Exit decisions compound in the right direction. They free resources that immediately make the rest of the portfolio stronger.
The Middle Is the Most Expensive Place to Be
Most brands have too many products in the middle. Neither invested in nor exited. Just carried.
They generate just enough revenue to avoid a cut. They consume just enough resources to slow everything else down. They occupy just enough shelf space, distributor attention, and team bandwidth to prevent the brands they represent from concentrating on what actually works.
The middle is where portfolios go to plateau.
The brands that break through consistently have one thing in common: they made the portfolio decisions everyone else was avoiding. They invested in the right SKUs, fixed the fixable ones with discipline, and exited the structural losers before those losses compounded.
The framework isn’t complicated. The hard part is the honesty it requires.
Where to Start
If you haven’t run a formal SKU rationalization on your portfolio, start with these three questions for each product:
Is the consumer coming back? Pull repeat purchase rate by SKU, not blended. The number that’s hurting your average is almost always hiding in a product you’ve been calling okay.
Is the margin holding across channels? Blended margin is a comfortable fiction. Channel-level margin tells you whether your pricing architecture is working or whether one route to market is subsidizing the others.
Is this SKU growing the brand or just the revenue line? A product that drives volume without building brand equity, consumer loyalty, or category position is a short-term number and a long-term liability.
The answers to those three questions will tell you which bucket every product belongs in.
If you want this analysis done properly on your actual portfolio, the Product Portfolio Audit is a focused, operator-level evaluation of your entire lineup. Every SKU scored. Every decision clarified. Delivered in two weeks with a readout call so you know exactly what to do next.
Book a free discovery call: https://meetings-na2.hubspot.com/vince-andrich
Learn more about the Product Portfolio Audit: https://andrichfitness.com/sku-audit/sku-audit-final.html
Vince Andrich is a commercial operator and brand strategist with 25+ years inside the growth engines of Quest Nutrition, Bang Energy, and JYM Supplement Science. He works directly with founders and CEOs of $5M–$100M health and performance brands.
