Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

Now I bet you came here expecting me to commiserate with you about not enough customers. (There, there, dear, it will get better.)

But really, I want to talk about your

bare shelves.

If you’ve sold down your stock for the holidays, and stopped re-stocking with winter items, maybe your shop looks like this:

It’s a truism that empty shelves, or racks, look forlorn and picked over, and your shoppers will feel like the only thing “left” is stuff nobody else wanted… i.e. trash. So January needs to be spent

“fluffing up”

… using the merchandise you have to make your sales area look not only full of treasures, but intriguing and inspiring too. Like this:

Now, fluffing up empty fixtures may involve removing some excess racks and shelves from the sales floor. If you have folding racks or removable shelves, that’s no problem.

But what if you simply must leave your sales floor layout as-is?

What can you do?

Racks: Remove an arm from 4-ways. That allows you to fluff up on the remaining 3 arms. Or switch the arms from straight rods which need 10-20 items to look full, to waterfall arms which hold 6 or 8 hanging items.

Make a 2-way rack into a scarecrow displayer by putting both straight arms at the same height, forming a T. Coats, long-sleeve dresses, and the like look like they’re intentionally displayed… especially if you snuggle up a small table (or upturned large basket) to hold a trio of accessories.

Make shelves look fuller with the addition of underlays.

These baskets normally reside in a big dump table in the back of this thrift store, but for our fluffing exercise, we pulled them out, used fabric remnants and for-sale place mats to give some weight to the display, and added a little clock and some brass bookends for textural interest. Lots of appeal, even with low merchandise levels. We didn’t have to move the heavy gondola off the sales floor, and it’ll be ready for next month’s influx of new-to-us goods in a snap!

That’s the way to fluff!