The Need for Individuality
Creative merchandising begins when you recognize the need for individuality - a need that is felt by retailers and their customers at every point along the price and income scale.
Your customers have a basic need to be individuals. This is most obvious among fashion leaders, who are dominated by the desire to stand out, and who have the funds and the social courage to do just that.
Among women who buy moderately priced, mass produced, firmly accepted fashions most of the time, the need to be an individual is by no means dead or dormant. It may express itself only infrequently and in small ways, but it is there.
Your department has a basic need to be individual. Fashion moves so quickly, so much is purchased from mass producers, so quickly are styles copied, adapted, built on, that it is all too easy for one store to look like another. This is something to guard against constantly.
Achieving Individuality
For a retailer to achieve individuality while selling commonplace merchandise is not entirely impossible. Souvenir shops do it beautifully by creating a holiday environment that encourages tourists to purchase the same old hackneyed articles they could have bought at home. For a retailer to satisfy the customer's need for individuality, however, the assortment itself must have distinction. Then promotion, display, and selling can capitalize upon the individuality achieved.
The principal ways to bring individuality to an assortment are:
- to anticipate acceptable new fashions or looks, almost before your customers are aware that they are ready for change
- to introduce variations on accepted fashions or looks, so that the customer has new choices within the fashions she is not yet ready to give up
- get exclusives on acceptable merchandise.
A clue to a shift in demand is not necessarily an advance warning of a tidal wave. Sometimes it is. But most of the time it is an indication that you need only sample the new, not go overboard on it.
Usually, only a few customers are ready for the new. The rest will decline to be pushed any faster than they wish to travel. You simply court markdowns if you try to overwhelm all your customers with a flood of suddenly different fashions.
To give the more adventurous of your customers a chance to express individuality, you need only a few pieces of the new at first — a few plains among the plaids, a few prints among the solids, for instance.
But those few pieces will distinguish your assortment from the assortments of other stores and departments that are playing a monotonously safe fashion game.
Introducing New Variations
In introducing new variations on a familiar fashion theme, you can use much the same sources of information as when you seek to anticipate your customer's readiness to accept a new fashion or look. Your timing must be accurate. If your customers have not yet slaked their thirst for plains, or lights, or bulky books, there is no point in pushing patterns, or darks, or sleek effects upon them. Watch for the leveling off.
Your direction must be right. If your customers are moving from light to dark, your variations should be in the direction of darker colors. If they are moving from plain to pattern, your variations should be in the direction of more patterns rather than less.
For example, when women first showed a continuing enthusiasm for shirt-type blouses, most makers and most departments offered these only in colors similar to those then worn in men's shirts - whites and very pale colors.
Gradually, the color range broadened. Brights and darks joined the light shades. Stripes and plaids were added. Prints, and eventually wildly colorful prints joined the parade.
The direction in which the color preference of customers was moving was plain to those who watched the general fashion picture. The pale, unaggressive shades were popular while sportswear in general had a monochrome look. As fashion colors generally became brighter, harsher, and more varied, so did the colors in shirts.
The variety gave customers a chance to dress individually within the framework of an immensely popular and long-lived fashion for shirts and skirts, or shirts and slacks.
At the same time, the presence of each successive new variation gave departments an individuality of assortment that encouraged customers to return for further opportunities to find "something a little different'' with which to express their personalities.
Reaping the Benefits
Whether your department is high fashion or middle-of-the-road, your success in creative merchandising puts you at a great advantage over those buyers who play things safe and dull. Your assortment attracts favorable attention from customers. Your department gets its full share of the promotional spotlight from your management. And your creativity earns you the sort of respect in the market that makes resources come to you early with their own creative ideas.
