Monthly Archives: November 2011

Black Friday Special: Stories from Main Street

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A few days ago, I stepped out of my store to grab some coffee, and as I often do, I took the opportunity to visit with some of my neighborhood retailers to connect, see how things are going for them, and check in with friends.

Stepping out on her own

The manager of a popular women’s boutique has had dreams of her own since the shop opened a couple of years ago. Business is going alright, but the conversation we had didn’t end up being about the boutique she’s managing, but about her own dreams. She’s working hard, and hopes to soon open her own vegan lifestyle shop. She hopes to carry everything from clothing, beauty products and packaged food options. She has already contacted a couple of local landlords and looked at different options for available spaces. She’s also working with a popular local bakery to bring like-minded vegans together to build an early network of customers, and is working on an online fundraising campaign. She hopes her shop will become a hub in the local community, and can draw customers and fans from the entire region, which currently doesn’t have an exclusive vegan-lifestyle store.

It ain’t easy being green

One of my best friends opened an eco-friendly flooring, countertop, and interiors shop just a couple of month before I opened my retail store over 4 years ago. We often grabbed a beer together, to share stories and worries and encourage each other.

While I made the transition to become a media company, he started going back to working sales for a local wood supplier, while continuing to keep his shop open and his employees paid. Unfortunately, last week he announced that he would close the shop and cut his losses while he still has a little money in the bank. It’s heartbreaking to see, but he’s good spirited. He saw it coming, and planned out the closing accordingly, avoiding surprises for anyone.

Sometimes you just have to change everything

Another local boutique just went through a fascinating transformation, because the owner felt a change was needed in order to stay relevant. What was previously a funky costumes and vintage clothing store now offers affordable woman’s clothing, simple basics; fun, everyday merchandise. Most of the interior stayed the same, but the name changed, and with it the product. The owner, while she loved her shop the way it was, wasn’t afraid to change everything in order to survive. A lesson we could all learn from.

Keep on, keepin’ on…

Three stories, three different journeys. Everyone is on the move, times are changing, but people are upbeat. No need for a happy ending, we’re working on happy trails. Some days there are tears and stress, but the story of the small business owner is that of a versatile, adaptive, creative entrepreneur. Full of spirit, ideas, and can-do attitude. We might get punched every now and then. But we know what fights to pick, how to get back up, and we define success in our own way, defining our own journey, our destiny in our hands. We go to work early and leave late to get the job done so we can look at ourselves in the mirror and say to ourselves: this is the life worth living.

With those words I wish every one of you out there the most successful holiday season yet. A prosperous and joyous time. A time of busyness that turns the numbers from red to black. Also, a time for rest, a time with family, laughter, and reflection. A time to wrap up the old year, and look ahead to the new year with excitement.

Dress It Up!

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Quick and easy holiday window decorations


O.K., so the holiday season is upon us, and I have a surprisingly quick, easy, and inexpensive idea to share with you. All you need is some tissue paper in your favorite color combination, scissors, glue, a paint brush (preferably a cheap foam brush), and a razor blade or paint scraper.

I originally saw this idea on the windows of a clothing store. They had layered several different colors of tissue to create a plaid effect and it looked amazing. I have wanted to try it ever since. So here is my take on it. This is such a great way to add simple color and interest to your windows.

The examples I have here are for a fall window I recently did. The windows are for a shared office space of a bunch of guys, so I wanted to keep it simple and abstract. I choose to cut squares and rectangles and place them in a random line across the window. I love this idea for christmas because you can line the edges of your windows with tissue paper similar to what I have done and then string white lights behind it and you will have a beautiful stained glass effect at night. Another great idea is to cut circles from white tissue, in three different sizes and have them cascading down your windows like snow. Sometimes you can find pre cut tissue shapes, snowflakes, trees, etc. at craft stores and those would work great as well.

You may think this looks complicated, or that it may take a lot of time, but trust me, it goes up incredibly quickly. As long as you are fully prepared and have everything gathered and cut out before you begin. So here we go, let’s get started.

I mentioned above the supplies you will need, quantities vary depending on how large of an area you are planning on doing. For these windows I used about 20 large sheets of tissue, and a regular school sized bottle of Elmer’s glue. For larger sheets of tissue you will want to go to an art supply store. You can also use any white glue, Elmer’s, Modpodge, etc. But you will need to dilute the glue, 2/3 glue to 1/3 water. The only thing you need to be careful of is not to make it too runny. Then you will have a mess.

It’s a good idea to do a quick sketch of how you want your windows to look, that will help immensely once you are ready to start gluing. Once you have finalized your design you can start cutting out the shapes. An easy way to cut out a thicker stack of tissue is to staple the tissue together, that way the layers won’t move around and you will get even shapes.

Alright, now for gluing. Determine where you want your first piece to go, then apply the glue to the spot. Try to keep the the glue as close to the size of the tissue as you can to avoid a lot of clean up after. But if you do need to do some touching up, the best way to do this is to wait for the glue to dry, it dries fairly quickly. Then run the razor blade or paint scraper around the edges of the tissue, the dried glue slides right off. The same technique goes for when you take the windows down. Once all the tissue is off, just clean the windows like you normally would!

So that’s it. Simple, quick, easy.

Holiday Marketing Bootcamp: Part 4

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Check in to the season.

I’ve previously mentioned Foursquare, the popular check-in service for mobile devices. Now, with the newly released Oink app, it’s a good time to take a closer look at those tools and how to best utilize them for your business.

Over the last few months, I have been test-driving Foursquare, and I put together a few ideas that you can try out for the holidays.

Foursquare, like a lot of the marketing tools that are popping up on the social media scene, represents a brand new way for you to connect with your customers. This is great because it offers you the chance to connect to early adopters, trend setters, and with curious and smart people in general.

Of course, it also poses a big challenge: Things can change fast. Gowalla, after first trying to compete against Foursquare, completely redesigned and repurposed their app, and now does something completely different.

Any decision to invest in new tools should be made carefully, and revaluated regularly. (Just like old-fashioned marketing: Don’t take the newspaper ad rep’s word for it that you’ll get ROI from running an ad.) Do your own homework, and figure out what works best for your business.

So, Foursquare. It’s a popular (and free) app, available for mobile devices, which allows people to check-in to places, and share their check-in via Twitter, Facebook, and the Foursquare website. All of this works via wi-fi, cell network, or GPS, and automatically finds your location on the map. I can be waiting at the bus stop, check in, and tell everyone that I missed my bus and that it’s cold outside.

Why would anyone do this?!

They just do.

One thing Facebook has proven is that people love to connect with friends and share what they like, where they are, and what they’re up to. People have been doing this to the tune of over one billion check-ins as of September of this year.

It’s fun and easy and free and there is the build in incentive of being rewarded. Foursquare creates little rewards, that turn this exercise into somewhat of a game and awards mayorships and other badges of honor for frequent checkins.

There are a few other things you can do as “checker”. You can leave tips on what to do in different places, and you can also create to-do lists, so your friends can see what other places they should visit while they’re in the neighborhood.

Business owners can claim their location if it already exists, or create and claim it themselves. There is a verification process involved, where you prove you’re the owner of the business, and once this is accomplished you have control over the location. As an “employee of the location” you can’t be mayor anymore, but you can still check-in and broadcast your whereabouts.

The control over the location offers you the ability to see how many people checked in, as well as other analytics. This can be a very useful tool toward taking control of your marketing, as opposed to just trusting that slick sales guy trying to sell you ad space in the local fish wrapper.

The really cool thing is the possibility of creating your own rewards for people that check-in at your location. This is where the real marketing opportunity lies.

Offering rewards or incentives doesn’t just highlight your location over others as people find your shop on Foursquare, it also encourages check-ins, and instantly gives you the ability to reward your customers.

The Holidays are a great time for you to jump into this head first. Lots of people will be out and about and you can get a good idea of how the service works for you and what it can be for your customers.

Two years ago, when the service was still brand new, I gave away little bookmark calendars to people that checked in. This worked alright, but because the service was so new, I essentially just reached my regular customers. These days, a lot more people are using smart phones and the apps on them thus creating a larger pool of people to tab in to and a with that a larger reach.

YOU are in control.

Want to change the offer? Just jump on the website and alter the specs of the deal. This way you are able to adjust, be bullish or timid with your offer, and, you can track it by the hour so you’ll always know whether it’s working for you or not.

Gift Wrapper’s Delight

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A quick guide to setting up EASY Gift Wrapping for your holiday shoppers.

The reason why

Have you been thinking about adding gift wrapping to your repertoire of value added services? Well, I have. Four words to explain why you should definitely offer it this holiday season:

Everyone is too busy.

For just a minute, forget about product, price, promotion, etc. All year round customers choose where to shop largely by who makes their lives easier. During the holidays, an extra dose of convenience can mean the difference between customers dropping big bags of cash in your store or the guy down the street– or worse yet… the Internet!

For years, I avoided offering gift wrapping services to my customers because I assumed it really didn’t matter that much. After we started offering the service, I quickly realized how important it is to people. Now, three holiday seasons later, our gift wrapping station has evolved a to become virtually hassle free for our employees and expected as a value add to shopping with Fitzgerald’s Bicycles by our customers.

When we first dove into gift wrapping, our setup was simply a tube of wrapping paper, a roll of scotch tape and a pair of scissors…

I presented this pile of opportunity to my employees by saying, “hey guys, we’re offering gift wrapping now so be sure to mention it to customers.” The glazed over looks and head nods spoke back loud and clear, “sure boss, we’ll get right on that.” Our employees hated the process and rarely offered it to the customer. So what was the point right? Sure we got the job done when we needed to, but the pile of supplies mainly sat alone in the corner until a customer asked for it. I think the mantra of employees behind my back was, “what ever you do, don’t let anyone know we have gift wrapping.”

After my first attempt, I decided to put some real effort into the process, which has totally paid off.

Now keep in mind that we are a bike shop. If I were a clothing store, or sold a ton of chachkas, my gift wrapping set up would be way more elaborate. But the way we do it is extremely easy, low cost, and effective. In the end, it’s all about making your customers’ life easier, so don’t feel like you have to replicate Nordstrom’s gift wrapping.

What the finished product looks like

For us, gift wrapping has evolved into simply gift bags and a variety of tissue paper. Behind the counter we have three boxes of tissue paper (three pattern choices) and two boxes (two sizes of bags) of bags. All boxes have the tops cut off for easy “grab and go” for the employees. The tissue paper is somewhat high end with a nice sheen; I’m not talking about the super cheap, paper thin solid colors found at your local Dollar Store. The bags are neutral in color, made from 100% recycled materials, and have a nice woven string handle. Not fancy – Not cheap looking.

Now my employees ask each customer around the holiday season if they would like their items gift wrapped, and we have made a series of “Free Wrapping” radio ads that have us mimicking popular rap songs to drive home the point that we offer free “rapping” for the holidays!

How it really works in reality:

Look around for a paper supply company that offers the colors, materials and pricing that fit your budget. For us, we stuck with colors and patterns that went roughly with our store colors and of course chose the more expensive recycled options so we could convey our environmental philosophy. Here are some good options:
Recycled Holiday Bags for $.32/ea
Recycled Tissue Paperfor $.10/ea

You can even get bulk rolls of tissue paper to cut off at any length you want.

If you want to dedicate more space and options for gift wrapping, then I would suggest investing in a small desk (Craigs List will have what you need), a small piece of peg board, and some commercial grade wrapping paper dispensers. Mount the dispenser on the wall behind the desk and hang all your other supplies from peg hooks.

 

 

First step to get you going.

Dedicate space and measure your products. Figure out how much room you have to work with for your wrapping station and then measure a broad spectrum of your items to determine how much room you need and what sort of supplies will be called for. Once you get the space dedicated, everything else will fall in line and you’ll be recording your own Wrapper’s Delight radio ad Yo!

Make A List, Check It Twice

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How to decide what to stock for the Holiday Season.

In all honesty, you probably don’t care if your customers were naughty or nice this year. As long as they’ll buy from you, you’ll play their Santa. But unlike Santa, you don’t have the luxury of omniscience. Your customers probably don’t give you a list of what they want for Christmas. You may look around, realize that you don’t have any reindeer, and think to yourself, “I could never be Santa.”

Don’t despair. You have data!

What’s Past Is Prelude

With so many responsibilities for the small retailer, it’s often easy to focus on the task in front of you. But a little planning goes a long way. A good point-of-sale system with reporting features provides you with a place to start for your holiday season inventory plan (if you’ve been in business less than a year, skip to the next step).

Begin by looking at previous years’ sales totals for the holiday season. This will give you a rough estimate of what you can expect. Were sales high in some years? What contributed to higher sales? Did you have successful marketing strategies those years? Look through your notes and remind yourself of possible factors that contributed to fluctuations in sales.

Next, examine a breakdown of sales by department or category. Sales in certain categories might not change due to the holidays, whereas sales in other departments may be triggered by the holidays. For example, at our shop we don’t usually see changes in the number of high-end bikes sold during the holiday, but we sell many more kid’s bikes over the holidays than we usually do.  In what categories of your catalog will people make holiday purchases?

Now, dig deeper and start writing a list of items you think you should have in stock for the holidays. What particular items went well in previous years? If your stocking stuffer promotion helped sell 224 locally hand-made wooden thingamajiggees, you might put that on your list. But wait! Don’t get too excited; maybe hand-made widgets are no longer the in-thing. Perhaps locally crafted machined thingamajiggees are on everyone’s list this year. Data is not a crystal-clear ball. Your sales data also won’t tell you what people didn’t buy because you didn’t have it in stock or you didn’t have it at the right price. This takes us to step two.

Also, look at your Inventory assets at the beginning of the holiday period and at the end of the holiday period.  Hopefully, you had less inventory at the end. If not, you probably did something wrong. It could be that sales were down. Or your sales might have been gangbusters. Because you were running out of stock as Christmas neared, you bought more than you could sell. This is a fine line to walk in inventory management.

Know Thyself

My living room might get occupied for saying this, but think of your business as a person for a minute. What do you need to live the good life? Besides beach-side cocktails, a retail business like yourself needs to sell goods. You need to sell goods with enough margin to keep your stomach happy (that’s your overhead) and hopefully leave a little something for the brain (that’s you — the real you). In order to sell this stuff, you need other people. Most importantly, you want to figure out what they are wiling to purchase and how you can motivate said action.

This is the part where I hand it off to my partners. In order to figure this out, you actually have to talk with people. Talk to sales’ representatives (the good ones are biased but honest about it).  Find out what specials they have. Talk to other business owners. Find out what they are promoting. Work with them if you can. Talk to customers. Find out what products people are talking about. Think about more than just products; think concepts. The Go Local movement is popular today; are there locally made artisan products to feature?

You can now stop thinking of your business as a person, though it probably works better as a metaphor than government policy. Please don’t occupy my living room, there’s hardly room for me!

Make Your List

As you look at your data, talk with your constituents, and study catalogs, keep a clipboard with a list of product and sales ideas. See Justin’s article on keeping checklists. By no later than mid-November, you want to cull your list and firm up a plan. You don’t need a nicely formatted outline and project plan laid out in a Gantt chart, but I shouldn’t have to tell you to check it twice. Naughty, naughty.

Set the Elves to Work

“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / gang aft agley [go oft askew],” said the poet Robert Burns, but you might decrease the aft-ness of agley-ness by keeping your team on the same page. Communicate your holiday sales and marketing plan to everyone on your staff. Make signage. Trixy has many ideas about such. More than other times of the year, as the holiday shopping season gets into full gear, frequently note how sales are going and where inventory levels stand.

Most importantly, even though the holidays can be stressful for retailers: Be Merry.

Holiday Marketing Bootcamp – Part 3

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Using Product as marketing

In previous posts we created videos that helped us promote our product to the people sitting at home, not already shopping in our store.

Now let’s dive a bit deeper

This can be a smart way of creating buzz without actually spending advertising dollars.

Every store has a regular product mix that it’s known for in the community, and with it’s customers. The holidays can be a perfect time to expand that mix. It’s a reasonably safe time to try out a new product, as customers will be in the mood to spend money on new things. Bringing in seasonal products during the holidays is not just a great way to try out a potentially new line, but you can reach a bit further and bring in something that might be considered more “gifty”. Something that you can possibly only sell during the gift-giving season.

Of course, this is nothing new. Stores of all sizes have done this for decades. The clothing store will sell flashlights as stocking stuffers. The bookstore sells candy.

At Einmaleins, a store with the focus around European lifestyle products, we brought in several things that really hit home with our customers.

The first year, we brought in high-end poster calendars from the German publishing house teNeues. We created a special display for it and put those front and center.

Another very popular product addition for the Holidays were our german chocolates, gingerbread, and Christmas candy. Limited edition products. The festive candy we also used to decorate the store displays. Food is always a great marketing tool. Everyone loves candy and during the Holidays are a bit more relaxed about trying something new. Bringing in food also helped us avoid the struggle of being stuck with product we couldn’t unload after the Holidays. Sure, we had to put our chocolates on sale, but its food, so the losses weren’t that bad, and everyone loves a chocolate Santa on sale the day before Xmas.

Last year we really shook things up and turned our store upside down. Challenged with never-ending rising prices on European imports, and a very shaky and uncertain economy, we felt very uneasy about making big investments in European housewares. People were increasingly looking for local products.

In the beginning of the year, I got to help establish a street market for local crafters and artisans. After a couple of very successful markets during the warmer weather, I wanted to give my crafters an outlet to sell their wares during the holidays. Our climate in the Pacific Northwest isn’t conducive to outdoor events, so I invited my crafters into my store to sell their locally-made products on consignment.

In many ways this was a stretch for my shop. Locally made jewelry, wooden toys, and t-shirts were a big departure from the stainless steel salt and pepper shakers, and stylish dishware that I typically stocked.

However, the local product reflected the mindset of many of my customers, and we created a good mix of slick and local. I learned a lot about selling a product I would’ve never considered carrying regularly in the store and I kept some lines permanently after the new year. I was able to help the local community and economy by keeping many of my product purchases local, and I opened my store to a whole new group of customers.

Making money might not even have to be the main focus when considering stocking seasonal products for your store. Breaking even on a terrific marketing opportunity is a huge home run, considering that advertising can cost a lot of money. Finding the right seasonal products can help enhance your brand, help you market your business to a new customer base, and shine new light on your business to regular ones.