Get Your Boutique Ready for a Profitable New Year
Posted on | January 6, 2010 | No Comments
It’s the beginning of a new year. It’s time to start fresh, reevaluate, and rethink the way that you do business. Sometimes, when you own a small business, it’s hard to take a critical look at how you run things. Trying to evaluate with an unbiased eye can prove to be challenging, to say the least.
Start with your expenditures and go from there. Create a list or spreadsheet to track your cost on your inventory. Sometimes boutique owners want to carry certain products, but they turn out to be more time consuming than profitable. Figure out which of your products are the most profitable and then think about why that may be.
Your most profitable products may reveal a trend or niche in the market that you can take advantage of. If people are coming to you for purses more than anything else, you might consider promoting and carrying more brands this year. If independent label clothing is your money maker, consider meeting with more designers. By doing this, you can take your business in a more profitable direction that you may not have originally considered.
When you bring in new products or product categories, you need to make sure that they have the impact that you want them to. Find new ways of displaying and promoting that will grab attention and make it known that you are going in this new direction. You don’t have to stray from your original vision of your store, but keep money in mind so that you don’t stretch yourself too thin and suffer financially.
Sometimes it’s easier to introduce new products if you rearrange the store. Get some interesting clothing racks or retail displays. Alternating between garment racks, shelving, hanging bars, and wall displays will help to break up the monotony of offering a lot of one type of item. Make sure that you have varying degrees of textures, heights and depths.
Because you are in a boutique, you are not very limited in the way that you display clothing and accessories. You can use mannequins as hat racks or trees to display gloves. The possibilities are really endless. Just be careful not to stray too far from your theme or overdo it in one area. You want your store to be shopper-friendly, not cluttered or cramped.
Use your clothing racks as a way to display signs and décor that doesn’t get in the way of the shopper. You want promotional signs and key pieces of décor to be visible, but you don’t want them to take too much attention away from your actual products. Using a garment rack or the top of a display to place a sign can be subtle, but it won’t go unnoticed if it’s at eye level.
About the Author: John Garvey is on the staff of Only Garment Racks, a leading online source of clothing racks including garment racks. Find a high quality garment rack or clothing rack at http://www.onlygarmentracks.com.
Tags: boutique display > Boutique Management > boutique ownership > boutique racks > clothing rack > clothing racks > garment rack > retail clothing display > retail racks > store racks