Successful Retail Strategiescontinued from page 1 Panelists were Norm Silk, co-owner of BLOSSOMS, a flower
shop in Birmingham; Patti Brock, owner of Excelsior! Couture, a men’s
and women’s clothing boutique in Pleasant Ridge; Joanne Pintar, co-owner
of home, a home furnishings store in Royal Oak; and Rebecca Aughton, co-owner
of Bra~vo Intimates, an intimate apparel shop in Royal Oak. The discussion
was moderated by Mike Crosson, CEO of JGA Inc., an internationally acclaimed
store-design firm located in Southfield. The seminar was cosponsored by the Oakland County Small
Business Center, City of Royal Oak Downtown Development Authority, Royal
Oak Chamber of Commerce and Woodward Avenue Action Association. Buying Silk: We buy from our personal tastes. Our customers
shop with us because they like our taste. Brock: I buy what I love. You have to buy things
you feel passionate about. My enthusiasm for an item can help sell it. Pintar: We based the store around the stuff we love. Luckily people like the things we picked out. Passion Silk: It’s the joy of moving merchandise out the door. We
can see the components that we’re buying actually going out to the
customers and being enjoyed. Brock: We have established relationships with our customers. I’ve
been invited to weddings; I have seen children grow over the eight years
I have been in business. That is a wonderful thing. Pintar: Seeing so many customers come back is really, really rewarding. Aughton: The passion for me starts when the first customer walks in the door. I love being on the sales floor. I love helping the customer. When I measure somebody and fit them, it can almost transform their figure. I’ve had women hug me in the fitting room. I’ve had people almost in tears. It’s really an amazing feeling. Discipline Aughton: For me it’s controlling my day instead
of having the day control me. I usually start the day with a list of things
I really need to accomplish in between waiting on customers. I try not
to go off on a tangent. Pintar: My biggest challenge has been trying to
wear all the hats. I know how to do the accounting, I know how to manage
employees, but I’m also the buyer and the display person and the
salesperson. I really have to organize my time. Silk: I learned discipline early on. It’s
probably the one thing that made us successful. We started doing parties
and weddings and social and corporate events, and you can’t be late
for those things. You can’t not show up. Our motto was to get there
and be ready on time, and people talked about that. Brock: It was hard for me at first to delegate,
because I knew it was my reputation on the line. But there isn’t
enough time in the day to do everything. You have to put people in charge
that you trust to take some of the load off. Otherwise you’ll be
like a dog chasing your tail. Pintar: We get calls from people saying they want
to start their own business. The funniest one was a girl who said she
wanted to stay home and spend more time with her baby, so she wanted to
open up a store. I said, “If you want to have more time with your
baby, you should not open up a store.” It can be done, but it’s
not something to start up because that’s your goal. Brock: When I opened the store I had been recently divorced, and my son was going into high school. I had no supplemental income. I had a house payment to make and a child to clothe and feed. While my store was under construction, I also worked. Then when I first opened the store I didn’t make any money, so I still worked. I thought I was nuts at times. Burnout Silk: Just get away. Sometimes I’ll take a
day off and say, “I’m not doing anything—I’m going
to blow the whole day.” Brock: You are one of the most important things
to your business. Always make time to take care of yourself. You won’t
last if you don’t. I don’t go to bed at night thinking about the store,
and I don’t wake up thinking about it. I hardly ever take work home.
I don’t want my life to be my work. Ultimately if I felt burned out, I would probably find
a different career. Having a bad day is temporary. Silk: If you have an issue with something, that
can eat away at you. If you have a problem employee or something that’s
not well organized, take a little time and resolve it. Aughton: I’ve got [my dog] Chloe at work with
me. If I’m having a bad moment, I’ll say, “I’m taking
Chloe for a walk,” and I’ll just step outside. I’m also
really blessed that my partner, Debbie, is like Lucille Ball in disguise.
She’s a hoot. Anytime things are going bad at work, I have a comedian
there. Pintar: I get to not only take my work home with
me but take my partners home with me, because four of my immediate family
members work at the home store. We are together 24-7. If we were just
family members, that might not be good, but we’re friends too, so
we can have those laughs together. We try to keep [work and family roles]
separate, but it is hard. Crosson: Talk about not getting to burnout. There
must be some signs that you need to take the dog for a walk, giggle, take
a day off, exercise. Brock: I take care of myself first, and then I
won’t get to the point where it’s gone too far. Pintar: I tend to get overwhelmed around three
or four o’clock because I’ve been dodging all these bullets
during the day. I don’t usually have a short fuse, but by the end
of the day sometimes I feel the pressure building. I go check on my to-do
list and see what really has to be done before I go home. I take a breather
and regroup. I don’t want to ever, ever let the fuse go off on the
customer. Aughton: I had to learn the hard way. I crashed
and burned five months after we opened. Our business is a very skilled
business, and I was the only fitter. We were open seven days a week, and
I had to be there. I had to be honest about my limitations, call out for
help, and not feel that because I was the senior partner I had to do it
all. When I did learn it the hard way, my partner really stepped up to
the plate. I think she even surprised herself. [The sign of burnout is] knowing that it’s not fun walking in the door. When a customer walks in and you think they’re bothering you, it is time to go home. Tough issues Silk: Deal with it right away. It just gets worse
if you don’t. It’s the hardest thing to do, but it will make
you feel so much better. Aughton: If employees are not helping me, I reiterate
what I expect from them, tell them that I’m here to help them, and
we set up a plan. I have had one or two employees absolutely shock me
and turn around. I have to be really direct, up-front, honest and fair
with them. Usually it works. Silk: One of the joys of getting bigger was that
we could hire an employee who could be the bad guy [for dealing with problem
employees]. We put it in the accounting department. We made sure that
we always had a really tough person there. Pintar: Hiring someone is a crapshoot. But when
you get them in the store, you can get an idea of their personality and
their strengths and weaknesses. Concentrate on their strengths and find
other jobs you have that they could do better. Brock: I don’t want to hire people who are
just like me. Everybody has their own style and strengths, and it’s
important to have that diversity. Certain customers are attracted to that
person; they work better with them than maybe I would. It’s a really
good mix. Crosson: There’s a saying: “Hire for
attitude, train for skill.” You can’t train an attitude—you
either have it or you don’t. If you’ve got a great attitude,
if you have a passion for what you’re doing, you’ll learn how
to do it. Silk: Yes, because we manufacture a product. If
employees aren’t doing their jobs, productivity slows down. Pintar: Employees take a lot of time. It’s a full-time job for someone to manage them, teach them, show them what needs to be done. Right now we have nine employees, but a year and a half ago we had 16. Sixteen was way too many—there was no way to get them all being efficient. We weren’t getting any more done then than we are now. Customer expectations Pintar: Our return ratio was really low, so we
could afford to add a 30-day, no-questions-asked policy. Customers know
they can try it and see what it’s like, and they can bring it back
if they don’t like it. It has not hurt us at all. Silk: We reduced our return policy to 15 days.
Nothing goes out on approval. We’ve had employees who let merchandise
go out on approval and made a deal with the customer to buy it on their
employee discount. We also found that people would come on the weekend
and get accessories because they were having a party, and on Monday they’d
bring them back. We even had customers bring back vases that were still
wet inside from the flowers that were in them. Brock: Your store policies get to be whatever you
want them to be. We have a 14-day return policy. I often buy one of a
kind in a size range. If that item is on sale or gone, I don’t want
to see it again. People will always try to push the envelope. I had a woman
bring back a man’s fedora two years later. Aughton: If you’ve ever gone into a store
to return something and they stand there and look it over, you just want
to cringe. I never wanted a customer to feel that way. But as a small
store I can’t afford to have merchandise out of the store for three
months. I may have one item in that size and style and color. My policy is final sale on all intimate apparel. If you
came in as my customer, would you want to buy something that someone had
worn previously? Probably not. On anything else, we have a 10-day return
policy. If a customer comes back three weeks later with a garment and I know she’s a good customer, I put it away immediately and say, “What can I help you with?” Nine times out of
10 you can take a return and turn it into a sale. Crosson: There are little expectations, too. If the phone rings 15 times before you answer it, that’s not meeting expectations. Can I park, is the store clean, am I greeted when I come in the store, is the music the kind that reflects the attitude of the store, do you offer me a drink if I’m there a long time, are the fitting rooms big enough? Think about what turns you on or off when you go into a store. If there’s a problem, fix it. Competition Brock: My store attracts a non-big-store customer. My customers
aren’t mall shoppers; they aren’t interested in looking like
everyone else, so they’re attracted to the kind of store I have.
I like going into a place where somebody remembers me. In stores like
ours there’s a real sense of community. There’s much more emphasis
on personal service. In a department store it’s hard enough to find
someone to pay when I’m ready, much less someone to wait on me. I’m
not attracted to that at all, and I think my customers aren’t either. Crosson: If you’re selling everything that the big boxes
sell, you’re probably in trouble. Everyone here clearly has a passion
for what they do and a point of differentiation in the market. Their focus
and attitude is clear, and people are drawn to that. Pintar: In the slow months we do mailings using our guest book.
We get our customers to keep coming back into the store for exclusive
events. We have amazing nights - people lined up from the counter to the
front door. Aughton: Knowing your competition really, really well is how you
can plan your point of difference. [Since I’m a former manufacturer’s
sales rep,] all of my competitors were my customers before I opened my
store. I deliberately planned to do things very differently. I wanted something that was very inviting and very warm. Our dressing
rooms are huge. There are lots of hooks - a minimum of five in every dressing
room. The chair accommodates at least a 300-pound woman. These are details
you need to think about. I went to the Paris market and I’m going to the London market. I
subscribe to different journals around the world. I want to know what
the trends are. Silk: Personal service is the key - the personality of the merchandise you buy, the personality of the way customers are treated in the store. That’s what separates all of us from the big boxes. That’s the key to everybody’s success. |