Today’s trend towards customization has hit a new high point — now you can design the food you buy for your cat or dog, requesting the ingredients that your pet likes the best.  This also allows you to accommodate allergies and health concerns, of course, and whether your dog is active or a pooch coach potato.  So far this service is only available in Canada, from Red Moon Pet Food, but it will undoubtedly make it’s way to the US soon.

Customization is a hot trend in our society, and reflects our desire to be seen as individuals.  This is good news for independent retailers, because our business is built on customizing our product selection and service to meet our local customers’ needs. We can listen to what they are asking for, and make sure that our merchandise meets our market’s demands.

But customization can be taken a step further in most shops, because we have the ability to place special orders from most of our vendors to accommodate a customer who wants something that isn’t in stock.  You may be surprised at how willing many manufacturers and even importers are to fill special orders, even when they fall below minimum.

Just try going into K-Mart and placing a special order.  The rule in big box stores is that if you don’t see it, they don’t have it and probably can’t get it for you.  As independent retailers we should welcome special orders, and do our best to fulfill them efficiently.  Although small orders may not be profitable, by the time you factor in the extra time and effort involved, they do built customer enthusiasm about our excellent service.

You should have a system in place to handle orders so that you don’t lose track of all the details involved. We use a customer request card with a carbonless copy so that when the merchandise comes in we can put the items on the hold shelf and file the other copy of the card at the checkout counter.  The card lists all the data we need in order to place the order, and track it after it arrives. If you’d like a copy of the form to adapt for your store’s use, please e-mail me at [email protected].

By the way, the customized pet food information came from Springwise.com, a service I wrote about in my blog entry of October 6, 2008.  This Dutch service, established in 2002, claims to be one of the world’s leading sources of new business ideas.  They make use of a network of over 8,000 spotters around the globe, covering 70 different countries, and track more than 400 global offline and online business resources.  Their free weekly newsletter is sent to over 100,000 businesses in over 120 countries. You should be one of them!

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder