The Thing About SKUs

A comment on another site coupled with the upcoming holiday buying season led to this “explainer.” SKU is the abbreviation for Stocking Keeping Units, a shorthand for the number of physically different boxes you might find at a retailer for a brand, or more importantly, a product line. The was a time when the camera makers were overly prolific with producing SKUs. You’d find Camera X body, Camera X + Y lens, Camera X + Z lens, Camera X + Y + Z lens, and more. These days, many camera makers have backed off from that kind of box proliferation. However, Nikon just extended their product line with the Z5IIC and Sony with the FX5. In Nikon’s case they added four SKUs for one camera launch. That's more SKUs a camera dealer has to deal with. MBA programs—I went through one at the IU Kelley School of Business—teach the nuances of SKUs, and it’s important to understand them, as they do have some consequence to the eventual customer (that would be you). First, dealers have a love/hate…