You would expect to find mugs in the gift shop at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin featuring popular Shakespearean insults such as “You Rampallian! You Fustilarian! You clod of wayward mal!”  But when Ellen DuPuy, the outdoor theater’s Retail Manager, looks for new products, she goes beyond the logical inclusions of  licensed merchandise, picnic accessories and gifts relating to classical theater.

“We ask ourselves: what would women want to buy?,” she reports.  She knows that of the APT audience, it is the women who most enjoy stopping in the theater’s two shops before and after a performance, and during intermission.  They will treat themselves to small indulgences such as jewelry, chocolate and scarves. Women also like the idea of supporting the theater’s mission by buying Christmas gifts while they are there.

Knowing your store’s focus, and target market, are more important than ever in these challenging times.  When I speak at gift shows I often ask the buyers in attendance to take a moment and jot down a brief statement of their shop’s mission.  This ten word or less description can be used as a tag line in advertising, and also helps determine what goods get highest priority for limited open-to-buy dollars. 

If your tag line is “everything for the new baby,” you know that customers will expect baby gifts, clothes and furniture. If you decide to augment your offerings with toys for older children, that’s fine, but only if there is money and space left after providing the goods essential to fulfill your primary mission.

Ellen DuPuy might well have come up with a mission statement for the shops at American Players Theatre that stated that they would only carry merchandise relating to picnics and theater, but then they would be missing out on a significant source of sales.    Happily she is guided by experience, and instinct, so she is willing to expand their mission to also include a focus on impulse items and gifts that appeal their prime demographics: female audience members.

And as Shakespeare said in Coriolanus, Act III, scene ii, “in such business action is eloquence."

 

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder