Posts filed under 'The Tools You Need'
I’ve had the same “how’s business” conversation with numerous people in the last week – and in all of those conversations, we’ve ended up talking about the difference between those boutiques that survived and those that didn’t survive over the last couple of years. I’ve also realized that I’ve learned from first hand experience why some boutiques do better than others, and I thought if I shared my thoughts, it might help a lot when you are first setting up your sure-to-be-gorgeous boutique.
Location, Location, Location
One of our first retailers to go out of business had an absolutely quaint boutique. It was setup in a little craftsman’s cottage, and each room had a unique theme, such as stationary, toys, baby clothes, etc. Great layout for the store itself. But, for it to be in a cottage pretty much put it in the middle of a neighborhood. The owner told me when she had decided to close up shop, that her foot traffic had gone from about 30 people a day to four or five people a day. when I paid her my first visit, I remember being somewhat shocked that shops existed in that area at all. And I’ve lived in the San Diego area for years!
The trend continued, those shops that were setup in “unique” areas were consistently some of the first to close. Hand-select your location, consider the reputation of the area – hang out and watch how much traffic comes by…”we thought we were in a great spot in this newer strip mall, but we are off in the corner and there is virtually NO traffic.” – from a boutique owner that mostly pulled through but just quit.
Keep it simple
People do not like to walk into an over-crowded boutique. People like to walk into a boutique that they know has hand-selected the best of the best for them already. Too many options and you start to overwhelm the senses, start to lean towards a more “discount store” type of atmosphere. I think that buyers start to think “if I offer more options that will save me”.
I think the opposite is true – offer fewer, absolutely perfect, options, and you’ll create a loyal following. We had a retailer in a very touristy area of town – as she got more desperate for sales, she kept piling more stuff in her store (adding to her costs too mind you – the more inventory you carry the more money you have that is just sitting around, not making money for you).
The last time I stopped by, she had added buckets of plastic $5 and under trinket toys – saying to me “this seems to be all people are willing to pay for in this area”. She couldn’t see that when people walked in, there was no rhyme or reason to her selection – there was nothing that said “THIS is the superb style you can count on finding here” – instead it said “we have a little of everything, search around and see if there is anything good”.
Your style
In the end, the selection offered by a boutique comes down a lot to the style preferences of the owner or buyer. As a buyer, you need to know your style, need to know that your customers look to you to tell them what is cool, beautiful, unique, the next “it” product. They want you to do the work for them. Make sure your boutique has a cohesive look and feel that matches the product selection, and says exactly who you are….trust that you went into this business because you have ideas about what people “are really looking for”, and then offer it to them.
Mind Set
In the end, the attitude of the owner is what makes the biggest difference between survival and giving up. When I was in the thick of doing sales, I got to the point where I could almost tell by the tone of voice when the buyer said “hello” whether it was a good avenue to pursue or not. You would not believe how many sob stories I would get right off the bat. Which isn’t to say that those with the “right” mind set weren’t realistic – it’s just that they always start with a positive note in their voice and end with an “but there’s no question, we’re making it through this.” I don’t care how cheezy it sounds, success starts (or ends) with your state-of-mind, your ability to visualize, and how much fight you have in your spirit.
Learn, learn, learn
I have learned so much just by visiting so many boutiques over the last few years. You should do this too – visit baby boutiques that you know have a great reputation, take note of how MUCH product they carry, their price points, how long they’ve been in business, their location. I bet the ones that have been around the longest have a relatively simple selection, are in the “hot shopping districts” in town, and have spent time building a reputation for excellent customer service and top-notch style and trend spotting.
Selling to boutiques
Because I was just starting out, I was more than happy to have our product in all the boutiques that I talked about above…but I really shouldn’t have been. What boutiques your products are spotted in matters a lot to your brand. It also matters a lot to your time and ROI. Focus on getting into established boutiques but don’t ignore the new ones either. Sometimes, a new boutique nails all of the necessary criteria to be the new “it” boutique in town. Just make sure it’s a boutique you’re proud to see your product in.
June 30th, 2010
I figure a good place to start talking about planning the Fall ’11 collection is to just start listing some of the things that I need to start getting together NOW and the things that I need to make sure stay on my radar the whole time.
Get it together
Literally – I want a collection that goes together. No matter how many styles I settle on for the final collection, they must be cohesive. Cohesiveness matters to more than just the look and feel of my collection- it matters to my overall brand building and my bottom line. If you are a small, just-starting-out business, then you are going to want to maximize your buying ability. You will want to use the same fabric in more than one style – this will help ensure you can ‘make the cut’ (meet the minimum yardage required by the supplier).
To get it together, I’m starting with a theme. I feel incredibly lucky to have been struck by a theme idea when I was doodling the other night. Right now, there is nothing solid behind my theme idea – but it gives me ideas for discovery. I’m starting with a combination of two keywords – those keywords are already inspiring me to look at fashions, cinema, movie posters, etc. from certain eras. They are basically a great starting point for exploring. Just an idea to kick-start your theme hunt – try random keywords together, jot down words that strike your fancy.
Plan, plan, plan
Right now – I’m gathering some discovery tools (sketchbooks, color books, reference books) and hashing out a broad time line for the production of my collection. From there, I can layer my marketing and sales plans on top of the production plan. To start your production plan, work backwards from your launch date (selling season for Fall collections is late Jan/early February through May; shipping starts end of July; of course, nothing is ever set in stone) and set at least the following milestone dates:
- Salesman’s samples complete
- Trade show booth (and/or marketing materials) complete
- Website/wholesale ordering information complete
- Sample (production or technical kits) dropped for assembly
- Sample fabrics ordered (I have a lot to share about sourcing in the next couple of weeks)
- Final patterns approved
- At least two cycles of: pattern design, test sample for fit, fit meetings, pattern edits, test sample for fit….etc.
- Technical Sketches complete
- Styles approved for pattern-making
- Final style meeting
- Fabrics sourced
- Logo, website, and stationary design underway
- Collection theme finalized
Keeping on my radar
So much goes into just developing a collection, that it’s easy for me to let a lot of the “launching a business” activities get pushed to the side. I will keep bookkeeping activities on my radar daily. Stay on top of your bookkeeping from the very beginning, if you can manage. In addition, I have to constantly and consistently work on your branding, pr, and marketing –>both the plans and implementation. We just wrapped up a new logo design today – I’ll need it on my hang tags and care labels, website and marketing materials, email signatures, social media site avatars, website, and on and on. This time around, I promise to keep the trade show booth design and trade show schedule on my radar from the beginning too. Also – supporting my sales rep by providing them with pre-launch information and sneak peeks at the collection.
Ok – enough to do right now and more than enough to keep on my radar, I think I just made myself dizzy!!
May 20th, 2010
I innocently mentioned in a morning meeting that I was having trouble (ee gads, BIG TIME) keeping up with wholesale requests and vendor needs. This led to questions about how the process works right now. Which in turn led to immediate clarity that the wholesale account setup and ordering process for retailers was a mess, or in other words, doesn’t really work right now. We identified three main areas that are in need of serious help – the online shopping function is not completely implemented on our site, there is a major lack of links to the wholesale pages on our site (yikes), and we have way too manual of a process for keeping vendors updated.
Which means, basically, the whole process needs an overhaul. The first thing we are tackling is streamlining the ability for vendors to login and place their wholesale orders online through our secure ecommerce site. This will enable vendors to track orders better. We do have issues with an inability to set wholesale prices for some of “add-on” prices for the blankets. But we are very close to having online purchasing setup for the apparel collections. I know that when I have to order supplies, I LOVE being able to login and place my order online (should be standard right?). So why wouldn’t our customers appreciate this same convenience?
The next portion of our wholesale account setup process that needs attention is to make it very obvious to visitors of the site that we have wholesale options for retailers. Right now, there isn’t even a link to the wholesale page from a lot of our pages. HUGE oversight. Our retailers are a big part of our business, so the site needs to be informative to wholesale customers as much as it is to our direct retail customers.
Finally, we had to tackle the manual email response process and how to keep things from slipping through the cracks. In order to clean up this part of the process, we have to rewrite the content on our wholesale page, with clear directions on how to create an account. The biggest change will come from the creation of our wholesale docs page, which contain links to the current line sheets, product images, and other important information for our vendors. And, newsletters, newsletters, newsletters. We will send out a monthly newsletter (no, we’ve just never been able to get on top of this) to keep our wholesale customers updated on new product releases, blanket prints, pricing changes, and everything else that matters to their bottom line.
We have only been able to clean up small pieces of the process so far, but I’ve already noticed improvements. We are crazy busy these days, but are getting better at scheduling time to fix things that will increase customer confidence and relations.
October 19th, 2009
Oh bla dee – oh bla da, life goes on, la la la la life goes on. I’m sure that’s a trademarked phrase. We just got an email letting us know that Gerber® has trademark rights to the word “Onesies®”— we honestly had never even looked into it. So, we will be spending the next couple of days making sure that we are no longer infringing on their trademark. I can’t believe this is the first time we’ve been told that. I thought it was as generic as “t-shirt”, but nay.
Fall items are shipping
How in the world is everyone doing? Preparing to ship / already shipping your fall items? It’s already hard to find summer stuff in the stores around here. Well, I shouldn’t say hard, but there isn’t a huge selection. Stores are working on clearing out their summer items and bringing in new fall stuff.
Time to pitch gift guides
And in the PR arena, it’s gift guide pitching time. Remember to target your pitches to your audience. Visit magazine’s websites to find their editorial calendars. The editorial calendars will tell you the closing date and topics of upcoming issues. Magazines plan and complete their issues months ahead of the release date – so to get featured, your product / pitch has to be in their hands long before the closing, or completion, date.
Make re-ordering easy
Here’s a tip to increase business: make it easy for your customer’s to re-order. We just FINALLY created a wholesale quick order form. I love it! I love it! I love it! More importantly, all of our vendors were very excited to hear that we are making it easier for them to place their orders.
Have a great week!
July 20th, 2009
This post is in response to all the emails I get from buyers wondering where they can find unique products, and vice versa, from manufacturers wondering how to find buyers. So I wanted to share with all of you a great resource, no matter which side of the coin you’re on – the boutiqueup.com newsletters.
Lisa, from CreativeWritingStudios.com, has put together an bi-weekly email, similar to HARO, but aimed specifically at connecting buyers with manufacturers. There are two separate emails that go out – one where manufacturers list their product offerings and another where buyers who are openly buying list their product requests and contact information.
This is an invaluable resource for all of you who are looking to target your pitches at buyers who are actively seeking new lines. If you’ve been involved with any of the sales aspect for your company, then you know how hard it is to get the buyer’s attention, and even harder to find buyers who are looking for exactly what you’re offering. BoutiqueUp! is a free service (yes, I really said that and yes, it’s really true!), so make sure you sign up to receive the updates (sign up is at the bottom of the page).
Boutique UP! has a lot of additional services that you will want to look into – including a wholesale directory and wholesale catalog, and unique product reviews (she’ll create an amazing one-pager for you to send to retailers).
You should also contact Lisa if you are in need of writing services – she has incredible rates and I am familiar with her work, which is outstanding. She can write you web copy, your marketing materials, your press releases, etc. And like I said, the rates are reasonable for start-ups. Visit her at creativewritingstudios.com.
Keep on moving on!!!
January 24th, 2009
Ok, here we go ’round the mulberry bush. New regulations, new regulations, new regulations, we…all…fall…down. No, not really, but this stuff will make your head spin and that being the case, I’m not writing any advice about this – except for this one part:
**You must now issue a certificate of conformity with all of your shipments**
That should raise enough questions in your head. Start at fashion-incubator.com and keep your eyes there. I saw her sending out a request for more info from experts, so if we’re lucky, she’ll be posting even more information soon. Here’s the post to start on:
New product safety regulations that affect all manufacturers (fashion-incubator)
This is all due to the passing of the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act.
Here’s the link to the Consumer Product Safety Commission page that deals with this topic.
Make sure you do your research on this one and that you have all your bases covered. Also note that there are extra special regulations for manufacturer’s of children’s products.
November 12th, 2008
I can’t believe I finally did this – I’ve uploaded a sample template of the sales cycle tracking sheet that I’ve been promising for so long!
This is the system that I’m using right now (template has generic names and private info removed). Of course, I just found a scratch piece of paper from when I originally had the spreadsheet idea and it has different columns. Now I can’t decide which is better, but I’m sticking with the one I’m already using for now.
The current system (which is a simple Excel file) works for me because it always has the next action I need to take for each prospect, and when that action should take place. As long as I visit, follow, and update the spreadsheet during my sales calls each day, then I’m keeping the pipeline full. There are always prospects to call, follow-up emails to send, and existing accounts to upsell to.
The scratch paper I found had each of the following bullet points as a separate column, in case some of you might find this way more useful:
- Prospect (store name)
- Contact Name
- Contact Number & Email
- Send Pitch (enter date occurred)
- Call (enter date occurred)
- Follow-up email (enter date)
- Appointment (enter y or n and date)
- Contact again on: (always have a date here)
- Signed PO? (enter y or n and date)
I hope that didn’t make it more confusing than not!
March 24th, 2008
Where did Amber go? It’s been a crazy time in my business-owner life since I last posted. We had a fabulous celebrity gifting event in January. I will do a post soon on what a difference our “spinning cake” display made for exposure during that event. (You can see the display cake pretty good in the photo to the right, follow the link above to view more celebrity photos).
I did a great follow-up job of coming home and writing up a press release. I even stayed up late to perfect it and get a bunch of images together to send to one big-traffic site. I got that sent and it paid off. We were featured the next morning.
Then I tweaked it a little for the other media outlets, put my computer on stand-by and never saw its happy face again. That was it, my computer crashed completely. I did an ok job of backups, except for my emails and email lists. Oh what a mistake that was – what a nightmare it has been catching up.
Get an external hard drive and set up automatic scheduled backups for all of your files. That’s my big duh-I-should-have-already-known-that lesson for the day. And I wanted to say I’m back and I really have a lot of posts coming up to share about press releases, affiliate programs, preparing for the next cash-and-carry events, creating a “wow” display, and all sorts of other things I’ve learned since the great crash of ’08.
February 15th, 2008
My husband emailed me this link to Mind Tools-Essential Skills for an Excellent Career. Specifically, he sent me to the “Time Management” pages (I won’t get into whether or not that was a hint ! ha ha), which is the section I’ve gone through.
I found the site to be an incredibly great reminder of ways to ‘stay on track’. I’m already great about To-Do lists, but now, I’m applying the priorities and then re-writing the list so that only “Important” items are at the top. And then I work down the list.
What I saw immediately is that some of my most important tasks have stayed on my To-Do list the longest. By having them buried somewhere in the middle, I’m able to excuse them by not really ‘seeing’ them. Now these things are at the top and have to happen first. I can also see that I “skip” over them lightly because they are tasks I don’t like doing.
We’re working on tracking how long all of our tasks take, and that’s also a real eye-opener. I spend a lot more time dilly-dallying during the day than I thought I did. But this is good news (and not to be mistaken with IMPORTANT brain breaks and kid-time). It’s good news because it means I really DO have more time in the day to get stuff done. A lot of emails can be accomplished in a “found” 15 minutes.
The best by-product of this is that by the time I reach my night, my stress levels are down because I know I took care of the most important stuff for that day. If I keep working after the kids are in bed, it gets to be on some of my more enjoyable tasks – like DESIGNING!!!!
By the way – Project Runway is back on Wed. nights!!
November 30th, 2007
Finally! A picture of our booth at the ABC Show. Takes me forever to get pictures off our camera and uploaded and even
this picture cut off the top of the booth. But that was our booth at the show.
I see so many things that I would change already. We’re not at the point of having a hardwall booth yet, which I would love. I don’t know how much of a difference that would make. It is definitely different to do a show that has low (3′) sidewalls, vs. a show that has full 8 ft sidewalls.
Someday I’m going to come up with the perfect way to display our blankets. They need to be spread out so the name is eye-catching, but I also want to show that there is a variety of options.
Like I said in a previous post, all we can do is get better each time. Can you tell that I don’t like this booth anymore? Almost sounds like I’m trying to make excuses, but it is HONESTLY leaps and bounds above our first trade show display booth.
But you know, it’s a reminder that you have to just start somewhere and go for it. No matter what, you’re always going to want to make it better; there is always a part of you that will feel like if you just change this or that, THEN you’ll be ready to launch; THEN you’ll be ready to show off. But really, you have to just leap, you have to give yourself permission to have room for improvement. Make sure you believe in the quality of your products before leaping, of course. Quality matters a lot.
Basically, if we expect it to be perfect before we go for it, we’ll never start, we’ll never meet our own expectations (=misery), and we’ll miss the whole journey. Someday I’ll have a great trade show booth – for now we’re doing the best we can and trying different things each time.
October 4th, 2007
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