Boost Your Boutique Revenue With Apps

Apps are growing exponentially and there’s some great ones that can help you grow your boutique revenue and improve customer satisfaction.  I’ve selected two that are easy,  fun and have a big payoff.  Here’s just a few ways  you can put them to work for you.

1.  Provide styling service and wardrobe management for top customers using Closet Couture.


Closet Couture is a fashion social networking site where you can upload photos of your clients closets to a virtual closet, mix them with clothes from your boutique on a virtual mannequin and plan a wardrobe.  With this app you can help your clients manage their wardrobes and maximize the use of items they buy in your boutique.

One way to get started is host an event and invite top customers to bring in key items from their closet.   Build looks around these items with a few new pieces from your boutique (the ones they will be purchasing).  Snap a photo of all the pieces and upload into your Closet Couture account along with client information (names, sizes, favorite brands).  Email the looks to the clients or you can print them out at the event.  Each time a key customer returns and purchases, add to her virtual closet.  As new merchandise arrives you’ve got all the information you need to generate add-on sales and maximize your customers current wardrobe.   Freshen-up her looks from season to season intelligently and cost effectively or introduce her to new looks that integrate with her wardrobe.  Each season send-off  suggestions and invite her to visit your boutique for a quick “wardrobe refresher”.

Overtime you will house the closets of all your key clients.  This puts you in a position to ramp up your customer service experience to the stratosphere level.

2. Promote sales and give your store a touch of  “social glitter” from the web with Foursquare.

If you’re not familiar with Foursquare, it combines Facebook, Twitter and Text Messaging into a mostly mobile “game,” where users check in to various locations, get points and unlock fancy badges.  You are able to see other users checked in at the same location as you, and the person who checks into a location most often becomes the mayor.  Some local boutiques incent their mayors with a discount or special offers (think of it as a loyalty program).  You can use it to promote an event, announce new merchandise or send out a secret code word when whispered to a sales associate results in an immediate discount.

If it does not make sense to you just sign up and start using it.  You’ll unlock the potential of some pretty awesome promotions and separate yourself from “the malaise of retail sameness”.  So app-up and enjoy the revenue boost!

Are you using Closet Couture or Foursquare in promoting your boutique?  I’d love to hear your story.

How to Stop Overbuying for Your Store

Buying well takes discipline.  When I first started buying, the biggest mistake I made was overbuying.  It’s the biggest mistake most new buyers make.  In one hour I crippled my store for months.

What can I say.  I got caught up in the moment.  My endorphins went haywire and my unit buying plan by classification went out the window.  I severely strained my cash flow and ended up with a boatload of sweaters heading into the spring and not enough in tee’s as the sun flirted with my customers urges.  In essence I forced my customers to shop elsewhere for their tee’s  and took  promotional discounts on my new sweaters.  I paid sales associates an incentive to sell sweaters reducing my margins even more and increased my advertising to run a special sweater promotion.  It was a lot more work with little reward.  It was a total lose-lose except for the fact that it taught me a valuable lesson early in my buying career.  “Don’t buy groceries when you’re hungry”.

From that point on I did not leave orders at the shows.  I politely told reps “I don’t leave orders at market”.  It took a lot of the emotion out of the moment, gave me time to check my plans, allowed me to shuffle merchandise according to deliveries and to spend my money in a thoughtful manner.

Next I set up my open to buy budget to look like a checkbook.  Each order I wrote, I just deducted from my checkbook.  By thinking of excess order writing as an overdraft I was able to become more profitable with less drama.

And finally, in case my foolproof measures failed I added a clause to my purchase order that allowed me to cancel an order within 10 days of placing it.  It was my personal equivalent of “freezing the credit cards”...a cooling off period so to speak.

I’d like to say I never over bought again but I did.  But as a wise buyer taught me “never over buy just because but instead over buy for a cause”.

What’s your worst overbuying nightmare.  Got one?  Share it.

How Stores Can Play and Win in Social Media!

Last year many brands were saying “they would wait and see”  about playing in social spaces.  This year the waiting’s over and now they’re saying “We have to play”!  So the question is “how can you play and win”?

First you have to recognize that hard selling and advertising aren’t working like they once did.  All of us are learning and shopping differently so your brand’s marketing strategy has to reflect this.  Your brand has to go where the people are and the people are in social spaces.  About 75% of U.S. Internet users, use social networks and blogs.  And 16 percent of these users are more likely to buy from brands they see or discover in social spaces according to a May 2009 report by Knowledge Networks, a marketing consultancy.

Next you have to build a social strategy that integrates with your marketing strategy.  Anyone can pull off tactics like running a Twitter account or setting up a Facebook page and lots of brands are doing just this.  But a winning social strategy is just part of the bigger marketing picture.

Second Time Around, a 21 store chain of contemporary, designer, consignment clothing & furniture stores gets the big picture.  They wanted to create regional awareness of their Boston store through word of mouth and beyond that national awareness for their 20 other stores.  So they hosted a party called ShopUp in their Boston store.  It was an evening of shopping, eating, and schmoozing built around a crowd-sourced fashion show.  Shoppers were given 20% off during the event, and 10% off coupons for future shopping.   They were also encouraged to bring in designer clothes to consign that evening.

Here’s what they did:

• Pre-event they ran a contest through Twitter, where followers nominated the models for the in-store fashion show.
• The hashtag #ShopUp was used to track conversations taking place around nominations and the event.
• People then voted to select the final four models for the show.
• News about the event was posted on Facebook.
• Guests voted for the best outfit worn by a model during the show via Twitter and the model with the most votes won her outfit.
• The event was shared outside of Boston by streaming live video through UStream, Twittering during the event (using TweetDeck and CoTweet), sending TwitPics during the event, compiling a video of the entire evening on YouTube, and uploading photos on Flickr.
• A post-event survey was sent via BostonTweetUp twtpoll to determine the number of new customers and other information.

Results:

• About 75 people attended the event
• Sales were positively impacted
• 50 percent of attendees were new customers

They played. They won.  You can too!

Marketing – You Gotta Reach the Women

Women notice everything!  That’s important because they buy almost all of their clothes.  And they buy most of their kids clothes and they buy roughly 46% of what their guys wear.  They buy an estimated 88% of all U.S. purchases.  Plus they  “influence”  even more.

To succeed, your brand or boutique needs to get noticed.  To get noticed you need a  marketing plan.   A really, really good marketing plan.

Hello Retail World!

Must Love Boutiques is a place for boutiques – independent fashion stores, brands and showrooms to hookup, discover, share and learn how to stand out in today’s quickly changing marketplace.

My premise is simple: The consumer has changed.  The world has changed.  But many  boutique retailers and brands have not.

So if you are just starting out, have years of experience, or fall somewhere in between, join me in taking the first step toward interrupting “the status quo”.

Spread the love.  Must Love Boutiques.  Do you have a favorite boutique that has a unique point of view?  Tell us about it.  Hope you join the conversation.