Since your customer is extremely alert to fashion, your sales people must be especially well informed. They need all you can teach them about incoming looks, and what the major designers and magazines are currently sponsoring.
Your displays can be most informal, A rack, a manikin or two, a table on which to show small accessories, may be all the props you need. One of the most successful avant garde boutiques works with just such equipment, no more.
You don't need much by way of signs. Your customer is abreast of fashion news.
Rarely does a boutique reorder merchandise, since its emphasis is on the new and the unique. Some stores insist that any reorder numbers be turned over to the regular departments.
There can be exceptions. An occasional good item can keep running in a boutique for some time before popular demand and wide spread distribution catch up with it; and some boutiques have sold good styles literally by the dozen to individual wealthy customers. Special situation: In some stores, each classification in a high fashion boutique is bought by that classification's regular buyer. Styles that are too new, or expensive, or unusual for the regular departments are selected for the boutique.
If part of your buying is for such a boutique, keep in closest possible touch with the boutique manager. The feedback you get on customer response will be extremely useful in future purchases for both the boutique and your regular department.
If you manage such a boutique, try to get from each buyer the story behind his or her selections for your department. Try to give each buyer the story behind your sales results in her classification. The exchange of information will help you sell. It will also help your associates pinpoint your needs.
Creating a Boutique Effect
If you run a large department, firmly dedicated to well-accepted styles, you can nevertheless introduce a few boutique-type styles. They can be the frosting on the cake for your customers — a chance for something a little more individual than usual.
Find your boutique styles:
- among numbers your large resources consider too advanced for their regular lines
- among the lines of resources that are creative but too small to produce in big quantities
- among ideas that you pass along to resources, who may accept them and hand them back to you as excitingly new numbers exclusive with you.
Give your boutique corner the look of something special. You could do this, for example, with a few props that help mark off corners - a screen, a couple of tables, a chair or two.
Show how your boutique styles coordinate with other components of the currently important looks. If you can borrow related apparel and accessories to make a display, fine! If not, use fashion photos from the magazines, clever signs, and any other tools at hand. When boutique styles have lost their newness, blend them into your regular stock and seek replacements.
Appearance and Atmosphere
Even if your shop is only an alcove on a floor devoted to many other departments, seek permission to develop a mood-setting background for your merchandise.
The name of your shop should set its mood at once. Keep to the current language of your special customer. Especially in the case of teens, that language changes rapidly.
The decor should suggest the customer or activity you serve. For teens, the right background elements may include noise and crowding, lively colors, posters, pennants.
For others, like brides and maternities, the important elements may be quiet, space, restful colors.
Props can enhance the atmosphere. A little judicious borrowing from other departments and a little clever improvising may create just the atmosphere you want - a pair of up-ended skis and a snow report in the Winter Sports Shop, a few inflated balls or floats in the Beach Shop, the jackets of hit record albums in Teen Shops, and so on.
Advertising and Promotion
Try to work out with your Advertising Department a tag line to use in every ad, reminding customers that you have everything for the occasion, or purpose, or age-group you serve.
For some shops, special events and advertising media may suggest themselves. Work out the possibilities with your advertising colleagues and your fashion coordinator.
For example, bridal shops have had success with fashion shows for prospective brides, run in conjunction with the home furnishings departments of their stores.
Another example: Shops for teens may have occasion to bring fashion shows into the schools, or to invite home economics classes to the store for clothing clinics. There may be reason to advertise in school newspapers.
If you suggest a new and untried approach in order to reach your special customer, marshal your facts and reasoning carefully. Work closely with your merchandise manager. You may require approval from other executives in the store. Spell out the advantages and possible disadvantages, to help them decide.
Preparing to Merchandise
Preparation for merchandising a shop begins with researching your special customer's world.
You probably have an affinity for this special customer to begin with, or you would not have sought or been offered the assignment. Nevertheless:
- Mingle socially with your special group of customers as much as it is possible for you to do so
- Observe similar departments in other stores, not only in your own city, but in others that you visit. Do not overlook the opportunity, through your buying office, to keep in touch with buyers of similar departments in friendly stores
- If your shop is dedicated to some special activity, such as skiing or water sports, engage in that activity yourself or visit resorts dedicated to that activity
- Set up customer advisory boards, especially if you deal with younger customers. Most high school and college shops owe their success to the use of this device for keeping in intimate touch with the fads and fashions of their customers
- Study publications aimed at your customers. They are constantly researching, on a national scale, customers like the ones you plan to serve locally
- Seek information from resources specializing in the field
- Canvass non-retail observers of your special group-teachers, for pre-teens and high school girls; doctors, for maternity customers; society editors, bridal magazines, for bridal information; ski resort operators; resort owners and instructors in other sports fields.
Boutique and special shop merchandising is a particularly demanding assignment. It requires you to work in many markets and to develop your sales people into real authorities.
But it's fun! It puts you right on top of the fashion picture and lets you work with each fashion look as a whole, instead of living with only a segment of it, as you do in an ordinary department.
Finally, you couldn't have a better training ground for a career as fashion coordinator, merchandise manager, or head of a great fashion store.
