Case Study
How Enginuity Turned Dormant Stock into a Cash Engine Without Restructuring or Marketing Spend
The client
A Boutique Hand-Made Oriental Rugs and Carpets Gallery – Selling items Priced from ~$2,000 to $12,000
The Challenge
This oriental rug gallery was facing what many boutique businesses face:
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Slowed sales and declining foot traffic
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High-value stock sitting unsold for months
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Cash tied up in dormant stock
Heavy discounting risked damaging the brand’s premium positioning. Doing nothing was choking cash flow and growth.
Constraints
The owners were clear:
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No restructuring
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No extra spend for marketing/branding
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Limited appetite for risk (use what we’ve got).
The Strategic Breakthrough
Through the Enginuity Method, we modelled the business and identified hidden leverage. The greatest untapped opportunity was to:
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​Re-engage past customers
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Activate high-value, unsold inventory
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Preserve brand perception
We focused on one high-leverage point: the Repeat
Purchase stage of the value chain.
The Solution:
The Rug Residency Program
We designed a Rug Residency Program (a re-imagined “rent-to-buy” offer) based on behavioural psychology and brand experience. Rather than frame it as a payment plan, the program was framed as “A chance to live with the rug before making it yours”, with the option to change the selection for undamaged/pristine rugs”.
How it worked
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Offered by invitation only to 150 existing customers with an optimum mix of (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value) profiles
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Offered 6–12 month in-home residencies with ownership at completion
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Positioned as a lifestyle experience, not a discount and not a payment plan
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Required no changes to operations or advertising spend
The Results
Note on Context:
This result reflects a targeted strategy to a qualified segment of ~150 customers and applied to a selection of dormant inventory. Regular rug sales continued through other channels.
Rugs Moved
40+ premium rugs enrolled in residency offer in 10 weeks
Offer Uptake
~27%
Average Price Paid
$5,760
Immediate Cash flow
$34,000+ in upfront payments
Projected contract value
$226,900+ over residency term (on top of ordinary channel sales)
Customer Reactivation
60+ dormant customers re-engaged
Cash Improvement
18:1 uplift on underperforming stock segment
Cash ROI (client perspective)
12.1:1 return on strategy (upfront + performance fee)
Retained Value
Client retained over $208,000 in new revenue.
Brand Impact
No discounting. Premium position reinforced.
What made this work
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Dynamic Modelling to reveal the trapped value and the leverage point within the value chain for activating inventory flow
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A strategic move at a precise leverage point
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Effective customer profiling, rug selection price distribution & conversion strategy.
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Behavioural science-backed offer design, structure & emotional sequencing of messaging, outreach, timing
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No operational changes, rebranding, or marketing cost
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Enginuity activated cash, customer loyalty, and unused stock, simultaneously
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Minimal investment, maximum retained value
This is what it means to build a Performance Engine. We don’t just improve performance, we unlock hidden value using what you already have and set it up to work as a repeatable system.
Why We're Sharing This Case Study
This case study represents a low novelty, low complexity example of how our Enginuity approach to designing strategy delivers powerful results using existing assets.
Our other strategies remain commercial in confidence. We don’t publish them in order to protect the strategic advantage of our clients.