A hero product does exactly what it is supposed to do. It attracts customers and drives the bulk of sales. On average, just 15-20% of a brand’s SKUs account for nearly 70-80% of sales, making these products the backbone of merchandising, inventory planning and marketing. But while hero products continue to play a crucial role, many brands are no longer relying on just one bestseller. Instead, they are building a broader product portfolio with multiple high-performing categories to support long-term growth.
The shift is already visible in how brands revenue mix is changing. For example, women’s denim and casualwear brand Kraus Jeans has reduced the contribution of its hero styles from nearly 65% of revenue to around 50% by expanding into complementary product categories.
“While denim remains our core category, we have consciously expanded our portfolio with complementary and versatile offerings such as baby tees, denim shirts and flat-knit tops. We also experiment with emerging categories and trends. For instance, alongside our denim offerings, we have introduced newer segments such as athleisure to expand our appeal among Gen Z and millennial consumers,” said Ravi Punjabi, founder, Kraus Jeans.
A similar trend is visible at shapewear brand KRVVY, where the contribution of its best-performing products has declined from nearly 80% of revenue to around 60% in just a few months.
“Certain SKUs perform exceptionally well on specific marketplaces because they align with the shopping behaviour, search patterns, pricing expectations, and purchase intent of customers on those platforms. At the same time, we have a few evergreen products like All Day Control Shaper that consistently perform across our D2C website as well as marketplaces because they solve universal consumer needs and appeal to a broad audience. Understanding these channel nuances helps us optimize merchandising, assortment, and marketing more effectively,” said Yash Goyal, Founder, KRVVY.
Many brands are also moving towards a more demand-led approach to assortment planning. Instead of committing large volumes to every new style, they are launching products in smaller quantities and treating the first production run as a market test. The objective is no longer to predict every winning product in advance, but to identify winners quickly and scale them based on actual customer demand.
This shift is being enabled by technology. Real-time sales dashboards, POS data, marketplace analytics and integrated merchandising platforms are giving brands much faster visibility into how individual SKUs perform across channels. Instead of waiting until the end of a season, merchandising teams can track sell-through within days of a product launch, compare performance across regions and channels, and make quicker decisions on replenishment, markdowns and assortment optimisation. Winning products are replenished more quickly, while slow-moving styles are marked down, discontinued or replaced much earlier, reducing the risk of excess inventory and freeing up working capital.
Ultimately, the role of the hero product is not diminishing.What is changing is how brands build around it. Growth over the long run will depend less on finding one winning product and more on being able to keep building the next one.
