- you select some numbers from a line that, by and large, is a step ahead of your customers in fashion
- you select experimental and forward-looking styles from the lines of your regular resources.
If you can't find what you want among your familiar resources and among the mass producers, try small eager firms who are willing to experiment. For suggestions, ask your resident buying office and editors of consumer magazines. Their market contacts are enormous.
Try markets outside New York. The lines you see in New York generally have national distribution and are geared to tastes that prevail throughout the country.
In secondary markets, you will find producers who are not yet large enough to go national, and who are geared to local demand. In some cases, their local demand may be moving in the same direction as your customers' tastes, even though you are in a different region. Eventually the "local" fashions may be nationally accepted.
Cases in point: Levis started in the southwest. Lilly Pulitizer's colorful shifts started in Miami. The hippie styles for beads, fringes, head bands and ponchos started in San Francisco. The miniskirt first bloomed in London. The fashion for sports and casual wear had its origins in California in the 1930s. Fisherman's knit sweaters were indigenous to Ireland before they became a fashion here.
Getting Exclusives
Whether you are ahead of or a step behind the pace of fashion — you can individualize your department with merchandise not available elsewhere in your area.
You can get exclusives from a major resource:
- if you place enough business so that the vendor has no incentive to seek other outlets in your area
- if the resource offers you certain numbers - experimental or otherwise - on an exclusive basis.
If you share a line in your community, you can still get confined numbers if your account means enough to the resource.
"A good new idea" is a suggestion for a new color, line, fabric, or other element of the garment, or for a new way of treating an incoming idea to make it acceptable to one's customers.
Case in point: While fashion was in the process of shifting from miniskirts to below-the-knee lengths, one store worked out the particular compromise it considered right for the mini adherents among its customers: All miniskirts were offered with matching pants, so that customers could have either the long or short look, as they preferred.
Case in point: A buyer whose customers were ready for color contrast before the idea was generally available prevailed upon some producers to design slacks in harlequin combinations — and scooped the market before other producers and stores caught up with the idea.
"A good new idea" is not a meaningless change simply for the sake of change in a resource's number.
It is not a garment that you design yourself, although it helps if you can produce a sketch of what you have in mind.
The resource's designers are familiar with problems of costs, materials, labor, and skills and are better equipped than any outsider to do the actual designing. A hint is all they need - not a blueprint.
Risks Involved
Creative merchandising, like any other creative effort, involves risks as well as satisfactions. You can pay a heavy price in markdowns if you read the omens incorrectly.
Usually, your store is willing to share the risks with you. If your management has confidence in your ideas, it may send you around the country, or abroad, to find what you believe you can sell. It may even subsidize a good, small resource that you have found, to help you get production.
You can minimize the risks by:
- making sure your hunch is not wishful thinking but a soundly based and checked conclusion
- Exploiting your ideas to the full.
It is in exploitation that the profit element of creative merchandising lies. Creativity alone yields only personal satisfaction. Creativity plus exploitation yields profit.
And profit is what retailers are in business to make.
