Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

Many consignment and resale shopkeepers are attracted to shops which are not the standard unobstructed room but rather contain a handful of small rooms. It might be the appeal of a sweet cottage or the reasonable rent of a suite of offices. But are these individual rooms too limiting…or can they actually be taken advantage of to make a shop which invites exploration and discovery, which tempts browsers to turn into buyers?

A collection of small rooms can become a wonderful shop with a little paint and imagination and a lot of moving merchandise around. Here’s how:

Develop your “living room” first. This is the central room of your business, where people enter and exit, and where you will greet visitors. Make this room as large as possible and use it to showcase whatever items will entice the broadest range of visitors into exploring the entire shop. This room serves as the introduction to not only your shop, but to the variety of goods you offer…your “departments.”

With teeny rooms, you can highlight a pop-up shop

It’s the departure lounge, in effect, for your many jewel-box-like destination rooms. In your living room/ lounge, display a taste of your selection. For clothing resale, a mix of accessories plus several mini-swing shops/ display areas of current goods works best to lure browsers onward. For home decor shops, universally-appealing items such as small furniture pieces, colorful soft goods, and gift items would be best used to showcase all your choices which your visitors have yet to discover.

In your auxiliary rooms, your destinations, think style, not substance. Imagine a colorful bazaar in some exotic setting. Each vendor offers an intriguing style statement: brass lanterns and embossed leather ottomans here, cotton candy and colorful all-day suckers there. Some shopkeepers think that they must divide their stock into categories, creating a “bottoms” room and a “dress” room and so on. Or a home goods shop might reason “this used to be the dining room so I’ll put all the dish sets here.”

This may be the way your inventory records work…but it’s not the way people browse, discover, and get tempted into purchasing.

Style divisions is the way to go when you have to split your offerings.

Thus:
* A mostly-clothing shop might offer a room of “Fun weekend wear”, “Looking Good on the Job”, and “Celebrations.” Each of these areas also showcase allied merchandise: sneakers and hiking boots in Weekend, pumps and workday flats in Job, sequined sandals in Celebrations.

Of course, these divisions are fluid. Does a white Spandex turtleneck go in Weekend or Job? And what about the person whose required job attire is actually cocktail dress? That’s the fun of it…and the salesmanship of it. Moving merchandise from one style division to another will increase its saleability, and chatting with a customer about how her weekend wear requires a pin-striped suit because she works as a Saturday receptionist at a law firm, keeps your shop vibrant and exciting.

* A shop which focuses on home goods might arrange its offerings into Country, City Loft, Cottage Style, and so on.

Again, these divisions are ever-changing and quite flexible. Do the saltware crocks go in Country? Well, they could… but this week, they might look really good in the City Loft because that sleek blue patent chaise is the exact same blue…

With even more smaller rooms, you can set up and change continually a pop-up shop that features whatever’s hot in the marketplace now. These could be style fads, seasonal necessities, or simply a look/category/style you have a lot of right now. Thus, a smaller room might be Safari! or Resort Wear or all your black and white offerings.