Analyzing sales data on a regular basis is important for any manufacturing firm, and IPI is no different. Sales trend data is helpful in forecasting future sales. While there are many methods to analyze sales data, this blog post focuses on simply looking at the quantity of IPI’s various products sold during the past year. Even though the sales of many of IPI’s products remain consistent over time, every year there’s a few surprises in the numbers!
 | | Clothing & Textiles
Clothing and textiles sales are mostly driven Iowa’s prison and DHS Institution needs. The most popular products were socks (over 50,000 sold), bath towels (over 35,000 sold), and washcloths (over 100,000 sold). IPI also produced thousands of face masks and gowns for the State of Iowa during the last few months of FY2020. |
 | | Filters
Even with 100s of sizes of various styles of filters available, three sizes of MERV-8, standard capacity pleated filters really stood out in terms of sales with over 5,000 of each sold this past fiscal year: 16x25x1, 20x25x1, and 20x25x2. |
 | | Furniture
Our diverse customer needs coupled with a wide variety of standard and custom furniture products typically result in smaller quantities in our furniture lines. Notable high-volume items this past fiscal year include our Savvy School Chairs (15” and 18”), Pocket-Door Lockers, Dakota Stack Chairs and Piper Stack Chairs. |
 | | Graphic Arts / Print
By a landslide, IPI print more envelopes than any other product out of print ship. Specifically, #10 regular and #10 window envelopes are the most popular with over 500,000 of each printed last year. |
 | | Chemicals & Cleaning Supplies
The COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact on sales in this shop. IPI sold more hand sanitizer in individual bottles and for dispensers than any other cleaning supply products; this is amazing considering the dispensable hand sanitizer was a new product for IPI in March to assist our customers during the pandemic.
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| Plastic Bags
The two most popular sizes of trash bags purchased from IPI based on case quantity sales were 39x58 and 39x56, both of which are 55-gallon capacity. These sizes are sold in smaller case quantities than smaller bags, which causes the case counts of those sizes to be higher.
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| Signs
With 1000s of sizes and configurations of signs available, it’s no surprise that no specific standard signs stood out in terms of sales. What was surprising, however, was the volume of custom items the shop produced. In FY2020, the sign shop producing over 10,000 EACH of custom signs, faces, and decals. |
We hope you have found some of these numbers interesting! We'll continue recapping FY2020 in our next blog post which will highlight various customers IPI served last fiscal year. If you missed it, check out the prior blog post of new products introduced last fiscal year.