Your general customer around the holidays may be looking for good deals. So, ask yourself what “a good deal” is. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the product is at the lowest price they’ve ever seen. If they were only looking for the lowest price possible, they would have already gone online at 3:00 in the morning to bid on the item from an auction site.

They are shopping in your store to get a good feel for what the product is all about. It’s not easy to get a secure feeling about the quality and craftsmanship of a product when you’re looking at a two dimensional product online. This is why web sites spend big bucks creating three dimensional views that can be enlarged to show more detail.

So, consider your advantage here. You have the product in your store. Now the goal is to convince the customer that the product that you carry is worth the price that you’re asking. Not only that, but that it is “a good deal” by virtue of the fact that the quality is undeniable. The customer can look, touch, feel, hold, test, and try out products in your boutique or retail store. Testing the product with their senses helps customers to make an educated decision about what they’re willing to pay.

Your goal is to get them to feel confident enough to pay the price that you want. Many things can influence what a customer thinks when they’re inside of a store. Just assume that everyone is coming in skeptical. They’re making snap judgments with every glance and touch. Their ability to quickly deduce how they feel from their first impression of your store is something that you need to cater to.

Make the customer immediately comfortable with everything that they see. Exhibit quality from your entrance to your dressing room, so that nothing throws them off of their positive path of assumption. Make sure that they don’t feel cramped by spreading out your garment racks and retail displays. Avoid harsh lighting and only use spotlights to deter shoplifting and showcase certain products. You don’t want someone to be able to take cover by reaching into a garment rack to slip something into their purse, but you do not want to put them on edge and make them distrustful of your store.

Work on your presentation, quality displays, neatness, and customer service to ensure that this holiday season will be a successful one.

About the Author: John Garvey is on the staff of Only Garment Racks, a leading online source of garment racks including clothing racks. Find a high quality garment rack or clothing rack at http://www.onlygarmentracks.com.

Boutiques often have a harder time managing their inventory than big department stores, because bigger chains have money to hire outside inventory companies, or their inventory is closely tracked electronically. Boutique owners usually have to manually keep track of everything, which translates into a big job.

Delegating some of the work to your employees can help to take a lot of the grunt work out of the job. Divide the store into sections and have each employee work on the inventory counts in that section during down times. Assigning small sections to each employee keeps the job from becoming overwhelming for any one person. When everyone is done with their counts, have them go back and check each other’s numbers.

You can offer incentives and rewards for accurate counts if the employees seem unwilling to do the job. Holding a pizza party or something similar outside of business hours to get it done is a quick and effective way to do it. Letting everyone know that first they will count and then they will check another employee’s work will generally ensure that counts are accurate the first time around. You can also assign a team to each section so that they can take turns counting and double checking numbers.

Most companies make inventory counts outside of normal business hours a mandatory requirement. However, boutiques often have part-time employees with other obligations outside of their normal schedule. If you worry about making things mandatory and risking losing valued employees, offer extra discounts or bonus money to those who participate.

Avoid the problem of miscalculating how much time each section will take by having employees that finish early help out in other sections until everything is done. Have them take on an extra clothing rack or straighten out displays so that the store is ready to open on time. Clothing racks and displays can be marked with tags or notes so that everyone knows when a section is complete.

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 clothing rack or garment rack at http://www.onlygarmentracks.com.

Are you interested in expanding the base of products that you offer, but you’re worried about space? Space can come at a premium. People running boutiques often sacrifice space for location. However, there are ways to manage a small space without giving up offering items that you want to offer.

Selecting the appropriate merchandise is essential. This part of the job is usually considered the most fun by boutique owners. However, it can also be the most painstaking and time consuming part of the job, too. The right merchandise will jump out at you, scream, “I’m unique”, and excite you to put it in your store.

Once you’ve decided to invest in an item or brand, remember that displaying it is as important as carrying it. If you don’t show it in the right light and in an interesting way, then it will go unnoticed and you have probably just wasted a lot of time, energy, and money getting it into the store.

Promoting new brands or lines of clothing can be a very effective tool. If you have a mailing list or an e-mail notification list, a social networking page, or any other way of communicating directly with your current customers, then do it. Let them know that you are now carrying the brand, or use the item as a focal point of the e-mail or mailer. Customers that like your style will likely see what you see in the item and be inclined to come in and shop. This is especially true if you offer a coupon or other incentive for coming in. Many people won’t shop unless they have a coupon or there is a promotion going on.

Once you get them into the store, think about how you position the items that you want to focus on. Position your garment racks to draw attention to certain items. A boutique garment rack is more interesting than a standard rack. It is usually more ornate, holds fewer items, and utilizes shelves, bars, pegs, and hooks to keep the display looking rich and interesting. Using garment racks like this can help you to draw attention to the areas that you want to focus on.

About the Author: John Garvey is on the staff of Only Garment Racks, a leading online source of garment racks including clothing racks. Find a high quality garment rack or clothing rack at http://www.onlygarmentracks.com.

1) People love to shop at boutiques because they carry unique merchandise. Make sure that people can immediately tell what types of clothing and accessories that your boutique carries. Use signs and mannequins in your store front windows. Let people know which unique brands you carry. Use mannequins to help display multiple types of items at once. If your boutique has an outdoor sign, change it up frequently to help communicate your store’s vision and image. Keeping people interested is the first thing that you should be concerned about.

2) When people actually come into the store, make sure that they can easily see what all you have to offer. There should be plenty of interesting displays to look at as soon as they walk in. You don’t want to have all of your best displays at the front of the store, however. It’s a better idea to spread the displays out so that people are drawn to them from afar. Again, mannequins have been proven to be the most effective displays in retail history. People love to see what things look like when they’re worn, because it’s so much easier than trying to imagine it for every outfit that they pass.

3) Once your feature spots are completed, use specialized garment racks to display your other items. Too many circular garment racks can be difficult to shop from. Use lots of straight bar clothing racks to neatly display individual items in a variety of sizes all at once. Make it easy for people to get around and see what you have without them feeling like they need to stop and sift through every garment rack. Keeping the store easy to manage like this will ensure that people have a pleasant shopping experience and can actually see what you have to offer, every time they come into your boutique.

About the Author: John Garvey is on the staff of Only Garment Racks, a leading online source of garment racks including clothing racks. Find a high quality garment rack or clothing rack at http://www.onlygarmentracks.com.

Your general customer around the holidays may be looking for good deals. So, ask yourself what “a good deal” is. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the product is at the lowest price they’ve ever seen. If they were only looking for the lowest price possible, they would have already gone online at 3:00 in the morning to bid on the item from an auction site.

They are shopping in your store to get a good feel for what the product is all about. It’s not easy to get a secure feeling about the quality and craftsmanship of a product when you’re looking at a two dimensional product online. This is why web sites spend big bucks creating three dimensional views that can be enlarged to show more detail.

So, consider your advantage here. You have the product in your store. Now the goal is to convince the customer that the product that you carry is worth the price that you’re asking. Not only that, but that it is “a good deal” by virtue of the fact that the quality is undeniable. The customer can look, touch, feel, hold, test, and try out products in your boutique or retail store. Testing the product with their senses helps customers to make an educated decision about what they’re willing to pay.

Your goal is to get them to feel confident enough to pay the price that you want. Many things can influence what a customer thinks when they’re inside of a store. Just assume that everyone is coming in skeptical. They’re making snap judgments with every glance and touch. Their ability to quickly deduce how they feel from their first impression of your store is something that you need to cater to.

Make the customer immediately comfortable with everything that they see. Exhibit quality from your entrance to your dressing room, so that nothing throws them off of their positive path of assumption. Make sure that they don’t feel cramped by spreading out your garment racks and retail displays. Avoid harsh lighting and only use spotlights to deter shoplifting and showcase certain products. You don’t want someone to be able to take cover by reaching into a garment rack to slip something into their purse, but you do not want to put them on edge and make them distrustful of your store.

Work on your presentation, quality displays, neatness, and customer service to ensure that this holiday season will be a successful one.

About the Author: John Garvey is on the staff of Only Garment Racks, a leading online source of garment racks including clothing racks. Find a high quality garment rack or clothing rack at http://www.onlygarmentracks.com.

1) If you run a small boutique or kiosk, you may be fine with a run-of-the-mill cash register. If your transactions are simple and few and far between, there may not be a need for an expensive advanced software system. However, you will need to manually keep up with receipts and transactions if you choose this route. Most retail companies find it very beneficial to start out with the system that will best serve them in the long run.

2) Programmable point of sale software is very useful in specialty boutiques. You can program the system to conveniently keep up with things that are specific to your business. For example, you can have it keep track of monogramming orders or alert you when inventory on a certain item is running low.

3) Most modern POS software is highly developed and allows you to manage many aspects of your business on one system. The applications have been tested and fine tuned to fit many specialty types of businesses. These software systems are highly flexible, so no matter what your niche, you are bound to find one that fits your business.

4) You will need to consider the speed and quality of the system when you purchase it. Read customer reviews. A higher price doesn’t always mean a better product. You don’t want to end up with something that runs so slowly that you are unable to function at the speed necessary to keep your customers happy. You certainly don’t want to constantly have to reboot or send in your system for repairs, either.

5) Find a system that is easy for you to use. Touch screens are great if you get a durable one. Many include printers, CPUs, customer displays, and even remote scanners. These are great for inventory. Simply scan the items on your garment rack and other displays and the information can be directly downloaded into the POS system.

6) Some systems are even internet based and don’t require the hardware that others do. Keep your shelves, store room, garment racks, and POS displays fully stocked with minimal inventory management required. Keep your customers happy with fast transactions and easy returns. Keep your head from spinning by selecting the POS system that is exactly right for your business. Don’t be afraid of cost, when you start researching, you’ll see that the cost of these systems has significantly decreased and functionality has significantly increased over the past few years.

About the Author: John Garvey is on the staff of Only Garment Racks, a leading online source of garment racks including clothing racks. Find a high quality garment rack or clothing rack at http://www.onlygarmentracks.com.

It may be surprising to find out that smaller retail stores and boutiques actually have a tougher time doing inventory than big department stores. This is generally because boutiques try to inventory everything at once with only one or two employees working on it. Department stores categorize everything, creating smaller and smaller categories, and then put one person in charge of a tiny section of the store. The employees are not overwhelmed and generally give an accurate count of the section that they are responsible for.

Boutiques and smaller retail stores should take the big department stores’ advice to heart. Delegate the responsibility by dividing your store into different categories and subcategories. Hire an inventory specialist team if you don’t have the employees or the time to do it right.

If you are having your employees take responsibility for each section, offer a reward for accuracy. If you have managers and supervisors, you may want to have them go in behind the lower level employee and double check. If you warn the first person that their count will be checked, they are less likely to make mistakes.

Consider doing your inventory counts outside of your regular business hours so that there aren’t customers there to distract the counters. This will also keep your boutique or retail store looking nice and neat when you’re making that all-important first impression on your customers. You may need to motivate the employees to show up when it is normally their time off. Many companies make inventory count participation mandatory.

You can make it mandatory, but you may risk losing employees that have other obligations, other jobs, college classes, or trips that were planned in advance. Instead, consider offering rewards, like bonus money for participating. Play music, order pizza, and make it fun. You could give people with accurate counts longer breaks or lunches during business hours, or even a deeper discount on their next purchase.

Make sure that everyone has equal responsibilities. People that finish first should help you get the store back in order. Have them straighten the clothing racks so that the store is ready for opening time. A messy clothing rack or window display can make a bad impression and negatively impact the effort that was put forth to accomplish this task outside of your business hours.

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 clothing rack or garment rack at http://www.onlygarmentracks.com.

However, hiring retail engineers may not be within the budget of most boutiques. Running a boutique can be time consuming and require experience on many different levels. So, you may need to hire someone to help you keep everything straight and consult you on the retail processes that you are encountering. You may find it worthwhile to contact a retail engineer firm that offers consulting.

Going through a professional service can help you to focus on key areas of production, branding, advertising, marketing, and product placement that you haven’t considered before. Essentially, they’ve already thought of all those little things that you may not have run into yet. It would be proactive to get some advice and maybe a checklist of things that need to be handled.

If your operation is small, you can learn how to handle different elements of the business on your own. Some things you will need to know up front, but others can be learned on an “as needed” basis. Start with the basics of your business. Categorize and keep track of your plans on the computer or in separate files so that you have accurate documentation of each area’s details.

For example, you may have a spreadsheet or document detailing your plans. Expenditures, effectiveness, reasoning and execution of plans for branding, product placement, advertising, promotion, store image, and target market may be a good place to start. By keeping files like this, you can always go in, review what your plan was, assess what is working and what is not, and make changes. Keeping track of your thoughts and goals will help you to stay focused on developing your brand image and executing the plans to make it successful.

Executing your plan will affect every aspect of your store. You will be branding yourself with every little decision that you make. Ask yourself if what you are about to do is conducive to achieving your goals before you make decisions. Your boutique’s artwork has an impact on people’s impression of you and ultimately their decision to buy. The brands that you carry say a lot about what people can expect to find in your boutique. Even a garment rack, hanger or lighting scheme can make a lasting impression. Garment racks of poor quality instantly give people the impression that you are cheap or that you don’t care about your image. Quite the opposite of what boutiques in particular are known for.

Be careful with each decision that you make. Keep track of everything and make every move a purposeful and well thought out one. Consider hiring a retail engineer consultant if you feel that you are not able to make knowledgeable decisions when it comes to effectively running your boutique.

About the Author: John Garvey is on the staff of Only Garment Racks, a leading online source of garment racks including clothing racks. Find a high quality garment rack or clothing rack at http://www.onlygarmentracks.com.

Boutique owners are under great pressure to offer these exclusive customers a unique product. They have to constantly update their offerings to keep the interest of these whimsical shoppers. Finding new and exciting products to offer can be a lot of fun, but it certainly isn’t the only aspect of the business. Boutique owners often find themselves becoming their own shop fitters, creating interesting and effective displays, one right after another.

The displays inside of a boutique need to work with the theme. You can use lighting to spotlight areas of interest in your boutique. Think outside the box. Use things that aren’t normally used for displays while you arrange your inventory. Your garment racks can help you here.

There are clothing racks designed specifically for boutiques. They don’t hold as many items at once, helping you keep that exclusive feel in your store. You don’t want it to look like there are many items available like the one you’re promoting, even if you have boxes full of inventory in storage. People are willing to pay more for items that they think will not always be available. They want to feel like they made a rare find. They want to be the one that discovered this unique item.

Arranging your boutique to encourage people to feel this way is essential. There is a difference in an exclusive offer and something looking sold out. No one wants to get excited about an item only to find that you don’t have their size. Make sure that the garment racks that you do have are fully stocked. This is why boutique racks are so effective. They don’t have a lot on them, but they do look full.

Customers will want to know more details about boutique offerings than they will about run-of-the-mill retail store brands. Make sure that you and your staff are well trained on product knowledge. This is the number one complaint when it comes to customer service. People want to know about the product they are investing in. Boutique shoppers are especially keen on details.

Keep your unique customers happy. Invest in a boutique garment rack. Your clothing racks can be a great asset when it comes to controlling how customers feel. Work on presentation, inventory, and customer service skills to make your boutique a success.

About the Author: John Garvey is on the staff of Only Garment Racks, a leading online source of garment racks including clothing racks. Find a high quality clothing rack or garment rack at http://www.onlygarmentracks.com.

Communication is the most important skill that a manager can possess. Communicating with customers, employees, other managers, and owners is essential to running a retail store or boutique. Make sure that you are always working on your listening skills. It’s a great way to earn respect, soak up useful knowledge, and diffuse tense situations.

People like to know that they’ve been heard. If someone comes to you with an idea of how to better run the business, you should listen. It doesn’t matter if it’s the lowest employee on the totem pole, you still need to listen and give the employee the attention that they deserve. After all, they are the ones on the front line, dealing with customers and store problems directly. You can learn a lot from someone who is in that position.

Listening to customers is also a valuable practice. If there is a problem and a customer is irate, then you need to pay attention. Don’t quickly try to fix the problem. Make sure that they have had their say. Many times, if you just listen, the customer gets their gripe off their chest and will calm down. Identify with their concern by being understanding, sympathetic and empathetic before you start rattling off solutions. Make sure that their feelings are validated and you’ll go far in dealing with irate customers.

Besides making employees and customers happy, managers also have to make sure that the business itself is running smoothly. This requires some thought and planning. Think one to two months into the future. Create goals for employees and for yourself. Promotions need to be well thought out before you implement them. You can’t just slap a sale sign on a garment rack and be done.

Think about what your customers will see and feel when they walk into the store. Are they excited about the products that they see? If not, you will need to update your retail displays and arrange things in a way that make them more interesting and exciting. Advertise your sales before you have them and be prepared for the extra shoppers. You will need extra inventory, possibly extra staff, and your clothing racksneed to be kept full.

Being a good manager requires extra work on yourself, not just your store, so commit yourself to research and implementation. You’ll see a difference in no time.

About the Author: John Garvey is on the staff of Only Garment Racks, a leading online source of garment racks including clothing racks. Find a high quality garment rack or clothing rack at http://www.onlygarmentracks.com.