The situation in China is making many of the vendors in our industry worry about whether they will have stock on hand to fill orders this fall.  In order to best serve their customers, some are asking that orders be signed as being non-cancelable.  Others are encouraging retailers to sign on to a planned buying… Read More

You may have seen them popping up in trade magazines, brochures or consumer ads.  They look a bit like barcodes, but there aren’t any bars.  Instead these boxes resemble an unsolvable puzzle.  What are they, and how do they impact your buying or advertising? The official name for these codes is QR, which stands for… Read More

HELPING OUR ECONOMY RECOVER Economists agree that the recession will not end until we have a significant decline in unemployment.  After all, people who are out of work can’t be free-spending consumers. And we need customers eager to buy our goods and services in order to fuel our economy’s recovery. Small businesses are the single… Read More

TRACKING THE RIGHT REP  I firmly believe that sales representatives play an important role in the success of a specialty shop, conveying information about new items and helping you stay on top of the latest in merchandising.  In order to make sure that my sales reps get credit — they almost all work on commission,… Read More

There are now over 266,000,000 Internet users in the North American (according to Internet World Stats), which represents a good 77% of our population. Not all of them shop online, thankfully, but e-commerce is clearly a competitor to brick and mortar stores that is here to stay. How can you compete with the deep discounts… Read More

How hard is it to produce something that will get your store on the evening news, on Vimeo and YouTube, and end up being posted on your customer’s Facebook walls?  Let me tell you about the “flash mob” event we just did at Orange Tree Imports, which cost us less than $500 — but in… Read More

If only they would make gift wrapping an Olympic sport, I’d have a chance to go for the gold. My training over the past 35 years has been wrapping hundreds and hundreds of customer packages.  And I’m really fast — but that’s mostly because we have wrapping down to a system. This service that is… Read More

The customer may always be right (or not), but the customer is not always cheerful.  One of the day-to-day challenges facing shopkeepers and our employees is how to deal with an unhappy customer.  Here are four techniques I hope you’ll find helpful: 1)Acknowledge that the customer is upset and ask them to tell you the… Read More

About four years ago, an announcement was made that a new “WebTV channel” was being created to help retailers be more successful. This idea evolved into a web site rich in streaming video clips on many different topics of interest to small business owners. The Gift and Home Channel site also featured a number of… Read More

In order to fully reap the benefits of Twitter and Facebook, you need to keep in touch with your fans regularly. But who has time to tweet and post, especially at this busy time of year?  I find myself coming up with a great idea at 11:00 on Saturday night, and all the social media… Read More