Flourish Tip for Retailers: Merchandising Standards

 Sometimes in retail, we think we can do it all, but we often need to rely on our team members to help us out with all sorts of tasks, including tidying the store and basic visual merchandising.

By making a basic standards outline, each team member will be easily guided for the daily tidying up and maintaining of those standards. This basic guide will also help when new stock arrives and for restocking displays when they have sold down.

Use as a Training Tool

Including pictures in your standards guide allows you to also use it as a training tool. When the store’s appearance isn't up to your standards, you can refer to the document to get everyone back-on-track. As your business grows, this merchandising standards guide can also be used as a delegation tool, while maintaining the standards your customers have come to expect.

Stress-Relieving Tool

Sometimes, what’s obvious to us isn't obvious to others. A merchandising guide allows you to return from vacation without walking into a disaster. With a standards guide, team members won’t waste time undoing and redoing each other’s work.

Your merchandising standards guide can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Need help making one? Contact Flourish Today! Follow us on facebook, twitter, and Pinterest, too!

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Flourishing Retailers Tip

Retail is the one business where change for the sake of change makes sense.  Change major displays up every four weeks wherever possible.

Where Faeries Live

Remember...  80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers and those customers visit more often than others.  By constantly rotating stock and changing up feature areas, you’re giving them something new to look at even when the merchandise isn’t necessarily all that new.

Consider scheduling changes, flips, and feature area displays on your calendar or with your team.  Explain to your team why you’re making these changes and what the purpose is.  If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the workload, consider hiring someone dedicated Visual Merchandising or bring on a freelancer or a professional.

Keep this in mind: frequent change will show you a difference in top line sales as well as profits!

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Tip of the Week + Bonus

Visual merchandising isn't just about selling more.  It’s about inspiring the customer, giving them ideas, making them feel good, and making their lives easier.

Cloud Nine Pajamas

Proper visual merchandising really is done for the customer and with the customer in mind and that’s the only way it can be truly effective. 

We create displays in order to show customers a whole look, show them trends, and to give them a feeling around the merchandise.  We’re making their time shopping so much easier by pulling everything together for them, so be sure to layer the look right up to give them options and make sure the merchandise is nearby and easy to pick up.

We’re inspiring customers to make their home an oasis, wardrobe beautiful, and gifts incredible.  Placing ad-on items nearby helps them to round out their purchase and pull together the perfect package.

Keep the customer in mind when you’re merchandising your store.  Remember how you’re helping them every time you set up a new display and you will be successful.  After all, they’re why you’re doing what you’re doing, right?

Bonus Tip:

  

It’s time to start formulating a plan to execute your holiday visual merchandising!  Don’t forget to book your helpers to make sure they’ll all be there.

Tip of the Week

Take the plastic off.  Customers really need to get their hands on a product in order to make their buying decision, so get at least one of each item out of its package and into their hands.

Elegant Expressions Table by Flourish

Engaging the customer’s senses is really important to making a sale, so appealing to sight and touch by allowing them to see the item up close and feel its texture will more often than not increase sales.

While many retailers prefer to keep items packaged in order to avoid damage, it can hinder sales.  Selling one item at a discount (which isn’t always necessary) is better than hanging on to product because it just won’t sell. 

The most important thing overall, is to remove barriers, physical or perceived, between the product and your customers.

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Happy Selling!

Tip of the Week and another Bonus!

Calculate your average dollars per transaction by dividing sales by the number of transactions.  This gives you an idea of how much each customer is buying and creates easy to understand goals.

For example: If your sales are $1000 (for simplicity's sake) and you had 20 customers that day, you would divide $1000 by 20. That means that the value of your average transaction was $50.00.

You can calculate your average transaction on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis! Its entirely up to you.

Want to know what to do with the information?

There are tons of things you can do! You can monitor your average transaction for things that seem to affect it or use it as a motivational selling tool! 

Having easily measurable targets to reach makes it easy to celebrate reaching your goals and breaking down those goals into small, manageable chunks makes for more celebration and more fun!

Happy selling!

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Bonus Tip:

Whether in a display or in a store, customers need a focal point to look at first.

Tip of the Week + Bonus!

Track your sales by category and use the information to help you when merchandising and buying.  It’s very valuable information.

© Anatoliy Babiychuk | Dreamstime Stock Photos | Image Link

When re-merchandising your store or purchasing new stock, it's so important to make educated decisions rather than taking shots in the dark, making guesses, or buying based simply on things you like.  Being informed will help you make better business decisions and help to prevent the need to clear out aged or stagnant inventory.

Track your sales by category, either using your POS system or keeping written records (contact your POS service provider or technical support to find out how).  You could do this weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually.  

When it comes to visual merchandising, you can use your category sales in interesting ways, too.  It can help you to allocate the proper space and placement to best sellers and help you to beef up displays and promote weak sellers.  Also, if you know there's an item or category that people are shopping for in particular or coming in for, you can place it in a key area towards the back of the store to get them walking through.  Hopefully they'll see a great item they wouldn't have otherwise thought of on their way there!

Bonus tip to make up for the technical problems we had last week...

Emergency preparedness is key.  It's important to have a plan for every type of emergency that could come your way.

Check out this Red Cross page for some great info.

Happy selling!

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Tip of the Week

Use visual merchandising to tell your customers a story.  This could be a story centered around lifestyle, colour, trend, or anything else you can imagine!

Spring table display at Elegant Expressions, by Flourish

Any display should give a customer a feeling or a sense, hopefully a good one! This is what telling them a story with merchandise is all about.

Are you having trouble getting started or do you need some inspiration? First, check your marketing calendar... how can you tie in your displays? Second, look for ideas online. In fact, feel free to visit our Pinterest page linked below! Most important of all, have fun with it and so will your customers.

Happy selling!

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Tip of the Week

Do you have inventory that is over a year old?  It could actually be costing you money. It does so by taking up space that profitable product could be using and by requiring regular movement.

A store's display full of aged inventory re-mixed and ready to sell! 

Sometimes, as a shop owner, it can be difficult to let go of merchandise because we know how much it has cost and how much work we have put into selling it already. Unfortunately, the time comes where that merchandise starts costing us money. The general rule of thumb is that merchandise shouldn't hang around your store for more than a year, so you need to consider clearing out aged inventory to make room for newer, more profitable items.

How is it costing us money? Aged inventory takes up space and ties up inventory dollars that could otherwise be spent on new, more profitable merchandise. It can also add clutter to the store or space, inhibiting sales of new product. Once you consider that, consider also how many times you've paid someone to move that product or moved it yourself. Not only is their time worth money, but so is yours! What could you have been doing to make the store money instead of moving aged merchandise?

Okay, that's great, but what are some solutions to this problem? Sign up to receive the tip of the week, sent directly to your inbox, and receive the answer plus a special bonus tip this week!  (You may have noticed that I got a little busy last week and was unable to keep up with my tips.)  All you have to do to sign up is click here!  Is that not working for you?  Send me an email and I'll add you manually.

Have you got questions for Melissa? Check us out on facebook, twitter, Pinterest, the flourish website, or send Melissa an email.