A SKU naming scheme resellers can still read later

A SKU is a label you write for your future self, usually while holding a box and wanting to be finished. Most schemes fail for the same reason: they encode things that change, or they encode nothing at all.

What not to encode

The price. Prices move. A SKU that says what you wanted for something is a lie within a season.

The platform. The whole point of an item identifier is that it is the same item wherever it is listed. Encoding where it is listed defeats that, and breaks the moment you crosspost.

The category, in detail. You will reorganise your categories. You will not want to relabel four hundred items when you do.

Nothing at all. A random number works for a database and is useless to you standing in a storage unit trying to find one jacket.

What is worth encoding

Two things, and they are both about finding the physical object:

• When it came in. Year and month is plenty. This is the single most useful fact about an item you cannot find, because it tells you which part of your storage to look in and how long it has been sitting.
• Where it is. Bin, shelf, rack — whatever your physical scheme is.

Then a counter, so each item is unique.

Something like the year and month, a location, and a sequence number gets you an identifier that is short enough to write on a tag by hand, sortable by age, and tells you where to walk. That is the whole job.

The part that matters more than the scheme

Pick one and stop changing it. Two overlapping schemes are worse than either one alone, because now every lookup is two lookups and you cannot trust a sort.

If you already have a mess, do not relabel everything. Start the new scheme today for new intake, leave the old items as they are, and let the problem shrink on its own as old stock sells through. A migration you abandon halfway is the worst of the three options.

Why it is worth doing in January

Because the alternative is doing it in November, during your busiest weeks, when an unfindable item is a cancellation rather than an inconvenience.

The quiet part of the year is when infrastructure gets built. This is the cheapest infrastructure there is.