Stock Control Across 160 Life Color Plus Variants

A hundred and sixty variants at the same price is an unusual stock problem: nothing is expensive, so nothing feels urgent, and the shade you actually needed is the one that ran out on a Saturday. Here is how to keep a colour bar stocked without tying up cash in tubes nobody opens.

The structural fact that drives everything

Which means the simplest useful rule in this whole article: order naturals in pairs, reflects singly. The protocol is in the grey coverage guide, and the natural series is broken down in its own article.

Three tiers, not one shelf

The third tier is where money gets wasted. Twenty-nine of the 160 variants are specialist — high-lift, corrective and fashion — and stocking them speculatively is how a colour cupboard fills with tubes that expire unopened.

Your formula cards are the stock list

Not your memory, and not a generic recommendation. Every three months, run through the formula cards and count which shades actually appear.

Two things fall out of that, and both are useful:

• The shades you genuinely use, which will not be quite what you assumed — every column skews somewhere.
• The shades you bought and have never once written down. Those are the ones to stop reordering.

It takes ten minutes and it is more accurate than any supplier's suggested opening order, including the twelve-tube list in which shades to stock first.

Organise by depth, not by arrival

Colour cupboards default to chronological order — whatever came in last goes at the front. Reorganising by depth, with each depth's naturals and reflects together, does two things:

• Gaps become visible. An empty slot where the 7.0 should be is obvious; a missing tube in a jumbled drawer is not.
• Formulating gets faster, because the shades you mix together live together.

It also makes it far harder for a stylist in a hurry to grab a 6.0 when they wanted a 6.00 — which is a real and expensive substitution, given they behave differently on resistant white.

Rotate, and mark part-used tubes

A 100ml tube frequently gets used in halves, so part-used tubes accumulate. Two habits keep that from becoming a problem:

• Mark the date you opened it on the tube, and put opened tubes in front of sealed ones.
• Cap them properly and store them upright, so the contents stay where you can get at them.

Storage guidance and shelf life come from the packaging rather than from us — but a tube whose age nobody knows is a tube nobody trusts, and it will sit there indefinitely.

Do not over-order to save on delivery

At £3.49 a tube, the temptation is to bulk up. Resist it for the specialist tiers.

The reason is not cost, it is accuracy: an order placed to hit a delivery threshold is an order placed for the wrong reasons, and the tubes added to make up the value are exactly the ones that do not turn over. Better to order what the cards say, more often.

Where bulking up genuinely pays is the daily tier and developer. You will use 20 volume; you will not stop needing 6.0.

The one-line stock check

The whole system reduces to a habit that takes thirty seconds at the end of a shift: anything down to its last tube goes on the order, today.

Not "when we next order". A shade at one tube is a shade that runs out mid-service, and the substitution made in that moment — the nearest thing to hand — is what produces a result the client notices and the formula card cannot explain.

The commercial side — part 2 of 5.
Previously: ← Which shades to stock first
Next: Cutting waste on a £3.49 tube →

Prices correct at the time of writing. Storage and shelf-life guidance comes from the product packaging.