Are you thinking of adding jewelry, accessories or clothing to your merchandise mix?  As Gifts and Decorative Accessories editor Caroline Kennedy said in a recent seminar, giftable apparel and accessories are a major trend in our industry.  Women enjoy buying non-size specific clothing and accessories for each other as well as to spruce up their… Read More

There is a movement afoot to level one aspect of the playing field between retailers who are David-size (like us) and the Goliath known as Amazon. We’ve all lost sales to customers who prefer to buy from Amazon because they won’t have to pay local sales tax, which in our case comes to 5.5% —… Read More

Need something to add to your Facebook feed, or an e-mail newsletter to your customers?  New arrivals and special events make good copy, but you should also consider mentioning your good deeds.  Customers like to support businesses that give back to the community, and if you are like most independent retailers, you give generously to… Read More

You may recognize this scenario: you want to carry some garden items in your shop for the summer season, but you can’t rationalize placing a minimum order of $250 to $500 with each supplier you want to buy from.  Here is a solution you may want to consider: a stocking distributor. Stocking distributors are consolidators… Read More

On a recent flight to attend a gift show, I discovered that my seat-mate had paid less than half the amount for her airfare than I had paid for mine.  Welcome to the world of dynamic pricing! Technically dynamic pricing means that the price of an item is determined by a specific customer’s ability to… Read More

Curling Cues    Of all the winter Olympic sports, curling has to be one of the least popular. And yet pictures of the Norwegian curling team are being eagerly shared all over the world on Facebook and other online media.  Why? Because their uniforms are so… Colorful. Controversial. Clashing. And totally unrelated to curling, when it… Read More

When the founder of Lauerman’s Department Store in Marinette, WI died,  author Michael Leannah reports that “thousands of people — rich and poor, of all faiths and of every rank and class — visited his home to pay their respects.  Flags throughout the city were flown at half-mast, and many stores and institutions remains closed… Read More

VISION CASTING    Do you have a vision for where your store will be in six years?  Many of us are too tied up with the day-to-day busyness of business to think as far as the end of the week, to say nothing of the end of the decade.  But the year 2020 will be here… Read More

What is your store’s conversion rate? We’re not talking missionary work, but rather the number of visitors to your store or web site who are turned into paying customers.  It is relatively easy to measure your conversion rate online, given the sophisticated tracking tools available on the web, while tracking the percentage of shoppers who… Read More

"The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior" is a popular mantra in the psychology world. Whether it is true that you can predict an individual’s future actions based on their past may be debatable — but in business, it seems to be true that our customers buying patterns are predictable enough that we… Read More