Within the same store, each classification and each price line sets its own pace in accepting a new look. The same customers who accept a new fashion idea with alacrity in, say, dresses, may be slower to accept it in shoes, or hosiery, or handbags.
Each price line, too, sets its own pace. The highest does not always lead; sometimes the lower levels are as fast as or even faster than your top or middle levels.
Your problem is to watch each section, each subdivision, of your assortment separately for signs that change is due.
Signs of Change
The need for something new is indicated when demand for a particular fashion or element of a fashion stops moving toward an extreme. Fashion is never static. It moves toward an extreme, falters, and goes into reverse. As Paul Poiret said many years ago, all fashion ends in extremes. If your customers appear to have reached their extreme, they are ready for change.
For example:
If they want skirts no shorter than the previous year's short lengths, they are ready to consider longer skirts. If they want colors no brighter than the previous year's brights, they are ready to consider subdued effects. If they want waistlines no more definitely marked than the previous year's strongly marked waistlines, they are ready to consider an easier line. If they are buying heels no higher and no more square and solid than the previous year's, or no flatter than that year's flats, they are ready to consider change. While your customers continue to move toward still shorter skirts, or tighter waistlines, or whatever the case may be, they are not ready to consider change in that particular segment of their fashion demand.
Creative merchandising does not mean trying to push customers into a change before they are ready. It means catching the moment when the more adventurous are unconsciously looking for something different, and finding or creating the possible next change the customers might adopt.
Searching for Clues
Clues to this early demand for change do not always show up first or most clearly in your own departments. They may be more obvious to you in other departments. Bulky sweaters first showed up in men's.
Your personal involvement with your own department and the merchandise you have selected for it may keep you from recognizing early signs of customer boredom with present fashions.
Look around. You can find clues almost anywhere.
Start your search in other departments of your own store, not necessarily those that are part of the fashion division. Your customers express their preferences in house wares, or notions, or men's furnishings, as well as in fashion items.
You can find clues to customer interests also in what other stores are selling. In your own store, however, you are observing some of the very same people who also patronize your own department.
And, of course, in your own store, you can talk to the other buyers and to salespeople about new items that are selling well and the probable reasons for their acceptance.
Case in point: A creative buyer of sportswear was a full year ahead of her competitors in recognizing and catering to a growing demand for brilliant color in the 1960s.
Touring her store, she found that bright colors were selling well in house wares, in notions, even in the frames of sunglasses. She promptly sought and introduced into her stock more bright colors and color combinations than she had originally planned. They sold briskly. In the process of combining the market for colorful merchandise, incidentally, she identified resources who were intuitively ahead of the rest in recognizing and preparing for the developing demand for bold color effects. Many of them had such designs in their lines but were unable to convince buyers in general of their salability before St. Laurent sponsored the idea.
Neither the department nor the resources concerned were high fashion or high-priced. As this buyer and her resources recognized, an incoming fashion demand can make itself felt in any or all price lines.
Another case in point: Several years before the miniskirt, women began to indicate a readiness for higher hemlines. They did not consciously request them, but somehow found shorter lengths more agreeable to the eye.
Producers in the junior markets were more alert to this development than those in the misses' and women's fields. Patrons of women's and misses' departments drifted into junior coat departments or bought petite sizes in dresses, even though they were inches taller than petites. Buyers who failed to recognize the growing interest in short lengths complained of poor sales in misses' and women's departments, as their customers either patronized junior departments or simply refrained from buying.
Creative buyers for misses' departments recognized and acted upon the customer demand for shorter lengths, even if it meant mingling junior and petite sizes with their regular misses' stocks. Their sales flourished.
