Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

Do you swing in your shop? What’s a swing shop? From the TGtbT.com Glossary of Resale Terms:

Swing Shop: An area dedicated to selling time-sensitive featured items. It can be as small as a single rack, or as large as the entire center of your shop. This area will generally have a much higher sales-per-square-foot figure. For more, see pages 20-23 of Shop Sizzle.

There’s swing shops all around us when we wander through the retail world. Here’s two I saw yesterday:

The first answers the age-old question “What can I get them for Christmas?”

Hmm, what do we carry that would make a good holiday gift? Lowes answered that question with this swing shop!

Addressing the concerns that are going through your shoppers’ minds is a good way to decide what your swing shop will be for the next week or month. A gift-suggestion swing shop is especially important in our resale shops, since we do want to let buyers see that yes, they can snag a wonderful gift, even if they are in a secondhand shop!

Another option for a swing shop is to solve their immediate problem.

And what’s more immediate than “What am I gonna cook for dinner?” This swing shop saves the shopper time and foot steps by gathering everything needed for that dish the demonstrator is whipping up!

First they cook, and then you buy: all the ingredients (even the cooking oil!) for the recipe they’re demo’ing.

My first day in my first Manhattan department store job, it started raining after commuters had left their homes. All those folks were caught with no protection from the weather.  A swing shop was hastily set up with all of the cheapest umbrellas in the store, right in front of the glass doors, and that’s where I was stationed, selling umbrellas right and left for hours. Proving that a swing shop can meet immediate needs, and make an immediate and unanticipated profit too!

What’s in your swing shop today?

PS Swing shops can be time-savers, too. Switching it out is a great way to freshen up your shop without totally rearranging it!