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Archive for the ‘Shopkeeping talk’ Category

What’s on their minds? Marketing locally

Posted in Shopkeeping talk, tagged , , on April 26, 2010|

Local celebrations are worth sleuthing outWhether you blog, email, Tweet, Facebook or simply do your darndest to keep your web site up-to-date and relevant, keep in mind

what your viewers are thinking about today.

That’s not always easy….after all, we are, each and every one of us…unique individuals…but there are still some things that bring us together. It’s worth (more…)

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Purse party, taken to new heights.

Posted in Shopkeeping talk, Used Stuff in the News, tagged , , , on April 23, 2010|

Louboutin stilettosWhat do you do when you want to expand your business but your market area is just too small for you? Even if it IS Los Angeles?

Or if you want to find better consignors?

You take it on the road.

Here’s the in-home purse party, the Avon or Tupperware party, taken to (more…)

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Are 2-ways the bullet points of retail?

Posted in Shopkeeping talk, tagged , on April 19, 2010| 1 Comment »

People StyleWatch seems to be succeeding when other fashion magazines are struggling, and one of the reasons appears to be short captions and few complete sentences anywhere to be seen.Using a 2-way as a bullet point in consignment and resale shops.

That’s what their …can we call them “readers”? let’s settle on “viewers”…want. “The few times we’ve done longer pieces, something on trying a trend that went on for two pages, it just didn’t resonate,” said the magazine’s editors.

“If we don’t have PowerPoints in class these days, students are going to rebel — they expect to have notes handed out to them, bullet points.”

“Attention spans are getting shorter.”

If two pages on a topic the reader, err viewer, is interested in is just not resonating…are your long jam-packed racks of jeans or dresses or tops doing it?

Or are your browsers looking for the bullet-point experience?

The very thing we as consignment or resale shopkeepers pride ourselves on, the variety we offer,

could loom in the eyes of a short-attention-span, 140-characters is all I want audience as badly as an indigestible chunk of a turgid novel does.

How to create bullet points out of your presentation? That’s what 2- and 4-way face-out racks do best:

Present a quick, easily-understood fashion story.

(Notice how my red paragraphs are bullet points? Doesn’t the emphasis make the remaining 150 words easier to digest?)

Image from Display Warehouse.

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Did you forget Earth Day?

Posted in Shopkeeping talk, tagged , , on April 16, 2010| 6 Comments »

Resalers can raise eco-awareness

If ever there was an industry that should go all out on Earth Day, it would be us resalers…

but April is such a busy season for most of us that it gets overlooked. We MEANT to plan some event, celebration, promotion…and we want tohelp the earth, but we dropped the ball. Or did we?

Here’s some quick-quick things you can do right now if you have Facebook fans, Instagram followers, blog readers, email subscribers.

  • Swap-out. “Bring in a clean and usable [handbag, pair of jeans, cooking pot] and we’ll give you [20%, $3 in store bucks, a hug]. We’ll give your donation to [the clothing  pantry, emergency shelter]. They get stocked up, your cupboard gets cleaned out, and you get to find a new [outfit, geegaw] to love!”
  • “Put your MyShop staff to work! For every $X purchase, we will donate 1 hour of volunteer labor to [the parks dept, Habitat for Humanity project]” (make sure you have willing owner or staff for this one…and PAY the staff member as if s/he were at work)
  • Something to encourage green living: “Come shopping by bike on [date] and receive [a $10 gift certificate, a reusable water bottle]” or “Get a free earth-friendly tote with any purchase…we only have 23 to give away so come early!”
  • Take the opportunity to reinforce your mission via ad, tweet, FB entry, press release: “For every T-shirt and pair of jeans MyShop sells, 4 pounds of fertilizer is diverted from the watershed, [and so on, look up some stats on the web re water, land, fertilizer, dye effluence, transportation costs]
  • Or go even further. How many pieces of merchandise did you sell last year? Multiply that out by any stat that appeals to you (landfill averted, number of cargo containers shipped from China with disposable clothing)… and that will astound your viewers.

After all, 2010 is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. That’s worth some attention from us resalers and our eco-conscious shoppers, isn’t it?

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Can you convert a browser to a customer in 4 minutes? No? How about if I give you twice the time?

Posted in economics of resale, Shopkeeping talk, tagged , , on April 15, 2010| 11 Comments »

Girlfriends shopping together stay longer so you can sell them more.

How’d you like to have double the chance of turning a casual browser in your shop into a full-fledged shop regular?

It’s simple. Add (more…)

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