10 Takeaways From the First 10 Months of 2023
Ashley Alderson gathers lessons from boutique owners on community-building, size-inclusive retail, inventory metrics, and buying timelines. Key advice: use plus-size models for accurate fit feedback, track daily sales and vendor reports, buy home and gift early for better perks, and follow TCPA rules on text and email marketing to avoid legal trouble.
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Hey guys, there is not that much time left in 2023, which may be a blessing for some of you. It may be a huge opportunity for even more of you. Either way, as we close out the year together, I want to look back at some of the most appreciated guests as told by you guys that we've had so far in 2023. So that's why we're doing our top 10 takeaways from the first 10 months of 2023. In this recap episode, you're going to hear highlights from my friend Leslie hall from the Zigzag stripe. Oh, such a great episode with Jessica Throneberg talking all about plus size and what's happening in that market, as well as email marketing with Jane Casper, a million and a half business and marketing ideas with Misko Seto, Sarah Dersholz, and so many more. You guys, we've had some really amazing guests in the last year and I'm excited to give you a few highlights this week. As we look back now when we decide to close out the year together over the next several weeks, I'm excited to help you with some holiday marketing ideas, how to finish the year strong, but also what is it going to take to set up your year for success in 2024? We'll do some industry insights and just a look at what's happening around the boutique world and how you can be ready for what's going to come in 2024. I hope you enjoyed this episode and all of the amazing guests we have had so far this year. As always, please please send me a message. I'd love to know what episodes have been your favorite. Who else would you love to hear from? What topics would you love to hear? Send me a message @ajalderson on Instagram and I would be happy to connect. All right, have an awesome week you guys. I hope you love this recap from our top 10 takeaways from the first 10 months of 2023. Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works. From mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat. My friend Laura Porwois, who is the owner and founder of Fern Boutique with four four locations around the Detroit area in Michigan is here not Only to tell us how she grew her brick and mortar locations, how she maximized community and chamber of commerce, and really just to become the queen of networking, in my opinion. Are you involved? Like, just connect the dots for me. Because I think there's a lot of people listening who, whether they're online or brick and mortar, I don't think it matters. But they have like a chamber of commerce in their town or a YP or whatever these organizations are. Can you name a couple of those? And also how do you find the value in those organizations? Because it sounds like, I mean, you've become a master networker. I don't think everyone in the hub that I've talked to on this, I don't feel like everyone's connecting those dots, that there's opportunity in those local organizations.
When I started, it was really inserting myself, like I said, in the business community. So the chambers of commerce, any of your sort of organizations that have networking or business type functions within them. So there's like, I mentioned Junior League for Women. That is a very great way to connect with other women. There's Junior leagues across the US That I am no longer a member. But I mean, that is where you meet women that have the same full, like, philanthropic, you know, mindset as you. There's definitely young professionals groups. I think there's also a lot of cities have these like, sort of smaller networking, passing leads back and forth type groups as well. But as you're. When I was new, all I could think about and I never thought this way. If I build it, like, if I open a store, they're just going to come in the door. Like, no, they're not. They're not going to. That's never going to happen. Like, and it's been. It'll be eight years in August and we've had the times of opening the store and the people coming in the door. Well, that's come and gone. I think whether you do a million dollars a month or $1 a month, nobody is like, I'm gonna drive around and see where I can walk into today. Like, that's just not a mindset anymore. It's changed so much. So really making sure that I was able to get in places where I wanted people to know who we were. There's Main street associations in some states as well. So downtowns have, um, they can opt into a program called Main street association. And then that's like a directory for you. You pay like maybe 2 or 300 bucks a year. But they have events, a website. If you're in a community where people really like to support the local businesses and they're really all about that. That's a great place to be in like a Main street association or directory because you're getting that connection to other businesses, potentially collaborating with other businesses, and then you're, you're really getting almost are promoted without spending, you know, breaking the bank if you don't have the, the funds when you start.
Yeah, yeah. I love that you said that. Because sometimes I think the misconception is if I join this association, they're gonna market me.
Yeah.
But that's not how it works. You have to market you. You just get to do it in their container. Yeah. So before I started the Hub, I don't know if you knew this, but before I started the Hub, I was in economic development. And then we also ran our chamber of commerce and our small business development center out of our office. And we did it for the county and four cities. So this was like my life. And it was always the same. Like the people who wanted to cancel were the people who were like, ah, you know, what are you doing for me? But really, like, we're facilitating and hosting all these events so that you can market you.
Yes.
So I love that that's what you're doing.
Yeah.
I think it just, it kind of comes down to the marketing seems to be the last thing every business, small business owner thinks about. We have bills to pay, we have people to employ, we have to sell stuff, we have to buy stuff. We have all this stuff. And then if no one's coming in or buying it, it's like, oh, but there's that thing that helps all of that stuff happen. So yeah, you kind of get. You got to like think about marketing and sales in a different way other than just social media ads or a billboard or a TV commerc. That is advertising. Advertising is not marketing. Marketing is not advertising. So those two things are, at this point, I think with the Internet boom and how it's been, I think it's getting lost. A lot of it's getting lost. And I had this conversation with my friend yesterday who's in business as well, and it's just like we want to be in the community. We want to talk to people and tell them our store is right over here on this street.
Yeah.
And that's what we're going to do. We're going to keep doing that because that long term loyal customer that's walking the door is like, oh, I see Laura at these events every week. I Saw Laura last month at this thing and Laura goes to that. So it's, that's your inadvertent marketing that you don't feel like it's making you any money. But it's like definitely a marathon, not a sprint. That takes time.
You're going to be joined today by Jessica Throneberg, the founder and CEO of Little Details Boutique. Jess is a longtime friend of mine and member of the Hub. And I really appreciate about Jess the fact that she always approaches issues or obstacles or stumbling blocks in our industry with a can do attitude and a willingness to look for solutions to problems rather than just vent about them. Your full size inclusive boutique, and there's so much conversation on this. What works, what doesn't work. I tried it. It was a flop for me. If someone is going to be a size inclusive boutique, talk to me about maybe your top three things they must.
Know in order to sell size inclusive items.
So let me just go ahead and say that this is my fourth attempt at being size inclusive. And when I say it's my fourth attempt, like, I tried it back in 2013 when we first started realizing I wasn't getting the best quality. So then when I asked myself, why did those items not sell? It was because the fit and the fabric were terrible. And so then I tried it again when we went into, we actually went into like a little vendor mall before we went into our first storefront. And so I tried it there, didn't work. And so when we went into our storefront in garner, we had 1200 square feet. And I remember thinking like, who is the demographic here? Like, are we going to get plus size customers? And there was Elaine Bryant in our shopping center. And so I remember thinking like, if Lane Bryant is here, then that means that that customer is nearby. And so tried it again, but we just didn't have the space for it. It felt like back then my 1200 square foot store had 5ft of back room. It was just very small. We rented like a storage space to house backstock. It was just really not a great fit for us. But we weathered that for three years and then went into our 5,200 square foot store in March of 2020. And I need y' all to know, like, that was 10 days before the pandemic shut us down, which was terrible. But I was like, you know what, like, we're going to try it here. Everything I clearanced was plus size. But what I wasn't doing in that storefront or in any of the other times was I was not modeling Those clothes. And so when the pandemic hit and I had a brand new store that we had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own personal money on, and I had no website because everything that was on the website was old product that we had clearanced from the old store and had sold out. So I had nothing to sell. But we were closed for six weeks. Like, I mean, it was insane. So then you think, like, how can you, like, get through this? And so we started doing live sales, but not with, like, comments sold. Not all fancy. Like, we were manually invoicing people on our live sales. And then we were doing 45 minute Zoom calls with people or like FaceTime calls to sell product to people because they couldn't come in our store, but they could go to Target, which was across from us, and they were packed. And I'm like, we ain't going down like this. So I was putting myself in the clothing on these videos and I was showing people, like, if I'm on a 45 minute FaceTime and Ashley's like, hey, how does that pink dress fit? Well, girl, let me go slip that on for you and let me show you. And what I was finding is that people were very much responsive to the fact that I am plus size and I'm putting my clothes on and then like, well, you should model that. And I'm like, I should, shouldn't I? And so now if you look at our social media, it's my social media manager, myself, like, we're just taking our photos on an iPhone. We're not fancy. There's no professional photographer, it's just us. But we are literally trying for everything that is size inclusive to do these side by side shots. And are the. The feedback from our customers has been so big because they're like, oh my gosh, it's so nice to see two different body types side by side.
Yes.
And sometimes the vendor cuts things differently for plus. So there might be a keyhole cut out in the small through large, but it's not in the plus size. Or there might be a different type of skirt to the dress in a small through large. And maybe it's more of a body contrast, but in the plus size it's an A line. And so it's showing it side by side to be like, there are differences. Here's what this looks like. And that has been huge for us. And, and I recognize that not everyone who carries plus is plus size as the owner. But for me, being able to say, like, I'm carrying clothing that I can wear. And so if you walk in the store and you see me, there are things here I can sell and that I can fit in. And that if you feel comfortable seeing me when you walk in the store and you're my size, like, girl, I got you. We have a spot for you. And it's not a space that is secluded in the back corner that says plus, it is side by side with everything else. And so you can shop with your friends and you don't feel like you're being ostracized to the one back corner of the store that only like five people go to. It's, hey, this is an experience and you're with your people and you guys can all shop the same.
I have so many things I want.
To say right now.
I love all of that.
That was so good.
But can, can we be so bold to say this? Because I love that you called this out and I feel like I've had this conversation hundreds of times on this topic and you cannot successfully sell plus size clothing if you do not have a plus size model.
Right.
And it has to be a plus size model who's not like a large and a half. It needs to be someone who's kind of filling it out a little bit. And I will say, like, it's frustrating for me as a plus size woman. Like, I'm a size 18 and I tell everybody, like, I'm very open about this is my size. If you're in our VIP group, you know my bra size, like every, like we're, we're just, you know everything about me. I'm an open book. And it's very frustrating for me to get plus size sometimes and order it and think like, this is going to be great. I already envisioned, like what this is going to look like on Molly and I, and then to not be able to fit in it and to like order like, I know, like if I'm an intro, I'm like in the middle. If I'm in this size, I'm in like this brand. I'm in the middle. And to get brands sometimes or to get products from brands sometimes and not be able to fit in it at all. And to know that I can't sell that now, if I can't take a photograph with that product on and they don't see me in it, then they don't think that's available in plus, first of all. And second of all, they know it runs small and then therefore they're not even going to try it. And that's what's frustrating. And. And that's what I'm trying to, like, really kind of give feedback on with my vendors is like, hey, just FYI, I got this dress in. I couldn't even get it over my hips. Like, it's not a dress. It's like a crop top with some extra fabric at the bottom. And. And I'm trying to give that feedback because for me, I know that that could have been a winner had the cut been a little better. And so it's just trying to help. Help people, like, realize, like, it kind of sucks. Like, I am very confident in my body. I'm, you know. But it kind of hurts my feelings sometimes when I can't wear stuff. And. And then for me, when I'm getting very adamant about is if I can't wear it, then I can't sell it, and then this is a miscut for me. And then we need to work together as a vendor to be like, hey, this needs to go back. Because now this is just going to collect dust. Like, I can't sell it on web and in the store. If they know that I can't wear it, they're just not. No one wants to size up. Like, no one wants to be like, I'm an XL and now I'm wearing the 3X. And I think that that's something that you have to be comfortable, like, talking to your vendors about. It's like, hey, this fit weird, or this was odd. But being kind and being like, is there something else I could buy instead? Like, can we trade?
Yeah.
My friend Angela Schmuck, who is the VP of operations and marketing at Roadrunners, I'm sure you've gotten the Roadrunners catalog or you've been to one of their showrooms in Vegas or Dallas or Atlanta. They're massive, and they support so many really great wholesale brands. Maybe this is a question a lot of people have about ordering in home and gift versus apparel is. Talk to me about the timelines. When you're ordering home and gift, do you have a lot of opportunity to order immediates, or is it more advantageous to order ahead of time and get in on, you know, these early product releases?
So that's an excellent question, and I'm going to give you lots of different answers to that, to that question. Because we represent such a diverse range of products, I'm going give you, like, a couple of different examples of how you can buy and gift and home. So we are already selling fall and holiday. So we'll talk about early buy. I think you guys in apparel call them like pre book. And so early buy is a little bit different. It is typically offered by your larger, larger brands. It's, it's typically not a smaller brand, but so larger brands offer it so that they can sort of get a pulse on what's going to be hot, so that they can go ahead and pre book larger numbers. They might think the pink is going to sell best, but lo and behold, it's the blue. So early buy in gift in home really is advantageous to do in advance as a retailer. And I think that's a piece that's really different. Typically you're offered all kinds of perks for helping the supplier out by placing that order early. So typically the way it works, the larger your order, the larger the perks. And they offer everything from freight caps to free freight to discounts off of the goods to dating to free product. The perks really, really vary. And early buys sometimes can start as early February to buy for holiday for the the following year. Which is great because it's fresh in your mind of what sold, what didn't sell, what you still have on hand that you want to re up or add in addition to. So there's early buy, then there are also monthly specials. So that's something that working with your sales rep that is like this big giant perk that you don't get when you're ordering directly from a brand. So every month we have what we call road specials. And these are things that your sales reps have that working with your rep, they'll say hey, if you order $25 more, I can save you $100 on your freight. So there are those monthly specials and then just your regular everyday, let's place an order that varies fairly widely. So we have some brands that are larger brands that will have a larger opening order, it could be 250, $300. And then we have brands that literally have no opening order. You can start with a brand by just ordering one case pack, which might be three salt and pepper shakers. So it, it varies greatly and that's one of the reasons that you want to work with a sales rep too. If you have ex open to buy, maybe you're really small store, you're an online store and you've got a thousand dollars, maybe even have only $500 to invest in gift and home. If you work with your sales rep, they can help you really get a wide variety of products with a low buy in and a low number of that you have to bring in. So that you can experiment with some product.
Lynn is a serial entrepreneur and also a famed video producer. You've seen Lynn's work with south by Southwest, the TV series American Made, and his interviews with literally hundreds of high profile entrepreneurs from the founders of Zappos to Dell to Starbucks and many, many more. So if you think about like entrepreneurs today, you know, we're fortunate enough here at the Hub to work with so many small business owners from around the world. What are the stories that are most important for small business owners to tell? What should they be capturing and sharing with their audience?
Yeah, no doubt the number one story, hands down, like you gotta have a great founding or origin story. Your founder story is gonna be the one you're asked about the most for as long as you own your company and for years after that. And I always ask founders that I film what stories do they share the most. And it always goes back to that. Now you've got product stories and brand stories and it's customer stories and you got to have those. But the one you want to optimize, you want to have different links of tailored for different audiences. Your founding story, that articulates how you came up with the idea, why you're doing this and why you're kind of the best person to do that. I mean just you don't over complicate it, keep it super simple, but you want to make it compelling, you want to grab their attention with it, you want to make sure that this is something they're going to remember. So that'd be the number one is the founding story. The second would be probably and this, there's a, an argument sometimes when I talk to some of my storytelling friends, whatever, but I'd say your customer story. Now the reason it's not you don't always have a customer story, Sometimes you don't have a customer, you have an idea, yet you don't even have bought it or has your services, whatever. So it's not always the best one. But you could still have a hypothetical customer story, someone who's using your product or will use your product and how they're going to benefit from. And I call that more of a problem solution. Here's the problem that the market has, here's a solution that I have created to solve that problem and here's the results that you're going to get from that. So the customer example, the customer story is going to help you articulate how someone loves your product, how they've used your product, how they've recommended it to someone else. And you can talk about it using their emotional responses, because you're expected to be very emotional about your product, very passionate about it, very into it. But when you can say, oh my God. For instance, my share snacks company, this is the company I have over here. It's an organic snack. We have a guy that buys six pounds of trail mix a month. It's bananas. And he has flown to Austin to see our kitchen to meet our team. He's our number one guy. Like we made a specific box just for him. So I can use that example and I don't have to brag or anything. I just give him the fact. Six pounds, that's a lot of frickin trail mix to eat. I can't even eat that much. And I own the company. So you want to have those customer stories that demonstrate how compelling your product or service is, the problem that it's solving if you don't just create a hypothetical one. So founding story, customer story, and that kind of, that problem solution story being the top three.
One of the things I admire about Zigzag Stripe is how Leslie from the very beginning really did build a community around her business. And if you guys have followed for any period of time, you know what I think of community? It is absolutely everything in business. And when you go into the Zigzag Stripes wholesale, or I'm sorry, not wholesale, but Facebook group for their business, you'll notice that there are just as many posts in that group of customers talking about how they love the product and also sharing selfies and building one another up and truly being such a positive space for one another. There's just as many posts about that as there are actually showing and selling products. That's a really, really incredible achievement. How did you get your community off the bat sharing so many selfies with one another?
I tr. One of the things over the years, you know, when, especially just being in the industry now for 10 years and seeing just the change in myself and you know, when I started the business, I was 30, I'm 40 now. You know, like, there's a lot of things that change from 30 to 40. And you know, when we started it was always, we've always been about providing clothes for women of all sizes. And that was, you know, I have fluctuated in weight so much over 10 years of like 50 to 60 pounds up, down, you know, and so I've always wanted to encourage women to just learn to love themselves and to learn to, to be comfortable in their own skin and, you know, like, don't follow the trend of what everybody's saying, like nobody fits in a box, so why are you putting yourself there? And so I feel like that is kind of what has really made our community as good as it is, is because that's kind of, you know, like, I don't want to say practice what you preach, but you know, like that, that is what we've always been preaching is like it's okay to be different. It's okay to be a little quirky. It's okay to have an edge to you. You don't have to fall into such a strict, you know, criteria of the norm and who wants to be normal anyways? It's overrated. There's nothing normal about me, you know, and so I think really that's what, that's what has changed our community is because, you know, like, it's ok. Be you. Do you want pink hair? Rock it. Be confident in it. If you are. Do you, you know, want to wear crazy eyeshadow? Do it.
Why?
You know, like, why not? Like if you want to mix your patterns and your color, like go for it. And as long as you're confident in what you're doing or wearing or whatever it is, like just own it. Yeah, I love that kind of. It's kind of where I feel like it's come from.
So many of the successful retailers I know come with a both retail art side of the brain and retail science side of the brain. Now the retail art side is most common to come by. Right. It's the love of the product and the customers and the marketing and all the reasons we get into this business for the most part. But the retail science can be a little bit trickier to come by. And that's inventory management and the numbers and financing and the things and the metrics that really make our businesses grow. Today I'm really excited because we're going to talk a little bit about both sides of this brain. But also what does it really take to make the retail science side of your business come to life and let those numbers and inventory management spreadsheets really speak to you. Today I'm talking to my friend Amy, the founder of Katch Boutique. When you sit down, what reports are most important for you to run and.
Especially again thinking of those who are.
Just started or just starting with an open to buy and they're analyzing turn.
And some of these things.
What is like your must do when.
It comes to your date with your numbers each week? Yeah. So every day I look at the sales report. So we have Three storefronts and an online. So every day is an important day. I know some retailers that are like online only, they do big launches once a week and so you can kind of scale it to what you need. But every day I look at my sales and I do a daily sales report by store. And so I look at how our sales doing each day, but also each week. Because each day could really, I mean if it's a snowstorm, right, your sales are going to be affected. But how it rolls to your week and your month is really important. So every day I look at our sales and then every week I pull a bestseller report. So I'll look at how my total week sales ended up and then I look at bestseller. So that's total company. And then each store and we look at what stores sold the most of certain styles. And if I have a style that does really well at one store or a brand, we'll move inventory between the stores to sell out quickly and that's a way to increase your turn number. So if you Liverpool is doing really well in one location and it's slow in another, I'll start sending more inventory to that location that's performing. Each month I look at a subclass and a vendor report to see if my sales and my inventory are in line. And for example, like sweaters, usually one of our biggest categories of business, it can go up to 28% of our business in, in some months can just be in the category of sweaters. So I have to make sure that my inventory penetration is in line with that. And penetration is just a fancy word for like percent to total. So if 20% of your sales are in IM in sweaters, then 20% of your inventory and your receipts should be in sweaters. So those are kind of the big ones that I look at each week.
And each month I have been so excited to bring Misha Cosetto, the founder and owner of over 11 boutiques in Delaware to the show. She's been a part of the boutique hub, the boutique Summit. She's been a part of our mastermind in retail bootcamp. And so I have loved getting to know her, her infectious personality and her super smart business strategy. I wish like if I could bottle up one thing from you and just spill it to everybody, it would be just how contagious your energy is. And we all have that within us. But it's so easy to get down on this. Woe is me, my sales suck, blah, blah blah. But this is possible for everybody. You people will buy what you're selling, it is your energy that you're selling. It's not the product that you're selling. That is the biggest lesson of all of this.
It is your excitement. Because people know I love my products. They know my staff love my products. And that comes down to your hiring too. Because I'm always. If people haven't been in my stores in 16 years, this probably isn't the right match to work. Because if you don't love my stores, you know, if you love my stores, you would have been shopped here in 16 years. That's kind of my attitude on things. If you haven't ever been in, it's a harder sell. I feel like, I feel everybody who successful me loved my products, was my customer beforehand. And that helps right there. That saves so much training, time and energy there with that, you know. And so, yeah, I, I mean, I think that, I think, I think your attitude. And I won't let those things steal my time in my life, I guess, or I know it always works out. It is just businesses. A lot of times when I say to my guys, because people like you got ripped off and you're not, you know, they're very upset that I got ripped off or I got things stolen, I said, what is it going to do now? We have to live and learn and how can we prevent it better in the future, you know, So I just, I cannot give, I'm not going to buy into bad energy. I'm all about energy around me and I have to have people that have good energy around me. You can feel that. Because I don't want the Debbie Downers, you know, going my way, getting on the train or get off the tracks. That's kind of my attitude with it.
I want to talk about that because over 16 years and with 11 stores, you've, you've managed a lot of people. And so I'm sure there's just leadership after leadership lesson that you've been through. Talk to me through some of those high points, like lessons that you've learned.
Well, I'm, I'm a person that trusts everybody, which I've learned a lot the hard way, you know, and I'm telling you, I trust everybody till they burn me. And that can be very bad because you, you, you don't realize what you get stolen from you and things. You know, I do believe everybody and I am still that. That's why I have to have other people buffer me because it is. They pre screen and everything because they're like, bisha, why did you Feel sorry and why did you hire? You know, and I do sometimes because I believe them, they want to change or whatever, you know, so it is. And I've learned every time I break my rules, whether it is, you know, asking, have you shopped in our shops? Have you been in his choice? Well, tell me about that. You know, I believe everything they tell me. Like I've got somebody right now, Everything they told me was not true. And it's going to come at the bite and I, you know, you spend too much time hiring someone, training someone, you know, and you want to build a relationship. I want them to, I want them to come in and have fun and want to do the job. So, you know, I feel like it's important and depending what level of group people you're looking for, like leadership, you know, you've got to do. I do strength finders and Colby tests. Every time I break that rule, it comes back to bite me because it may not be that I'm not going to hire him because. But I also know how to work with them better by understanding those kind of analytics and knowing what to do with them. And I think that that is a big part of it. So I use strength Finders book. It's a very simple book you can get on Amazon. In the back, there's a thing that the code, they can go do the test and it'll tell you about them, what their strengths are. Because I know I need certain combinations. Being small, a lot of small stores, we don't have like 10 people in the store at once working. You got to have the right people that are the creative people versus the people that can receive the products and ship it. And you got to have a certain combination. And you know, so. And I find those kind of tests definitely do help me sit back and look, is this a right fit? Is this a good. You good. Good for our business and where we need to go without everybody being upset or in turmoil or whatever. Because everybody wants to do the same job and no one wants to do this part of the business. So, you know, those kind of things can help a lot too, I think, as far as helping people there. And, you know, I have to do, we do weekly zoom calls. We do live in person trainings and so forth. And we have a, well, we have an entire. First of all, we have a good screening process now. We, we have a hiring 365 day program we have instituted because I have people that are older, I only have them for so long as well as for their health and different Things. Plus there's not affordable housing down here. So I have to keep putting lots of people in the funnel. So we have all different ways that we get people into our funnel. We have a set screening, a pre screening on the phone, and then to interview process. If they're looking for full time or leadership, then they're going to go into taking some, you know, like a strength finder test, possibly Colby, if it's going to be higher up. And then we have an online training program. We have just moved on our current platform all into one where we have our handbook, our policies, our procedures. I mean, I have, you know, and I'm still paper girl in a lot of ways. Like we have an opening closing checklist that they turn in with their closing paperwork. And I did a video for every little step of that checklist from how to straighten the rack, clean the rack, tighten the rack, do this whatever it may be in the stores because people don't know. And I'm all about tell, show, try, do. And I know it's repetition more than ever in our lifetime for people getting trained. So we put them through a whole entire training system, product training, perfect get to get the perfect purchase, how to greet, tone of voice all the way to the thank you. And then I added on a whole other section because we can, you know, meet people, greet them, build a relationship, ask the right questions, get the products, upsell them, thank them. But then the next key is getting them back in. And that's where you know, it's key to have a great rewards program, right? It's key to have. I'm always my guys have a list to promote. Like we are the concierge of our town. My guys know every event coming up in the town or every event coming in our store or you know what, go over across the street. Our store treasures, they're serving chocolate wine today. I mean, we promote and that is something you, if you teach your people to promote and talk, you can find staff, you can get, get customers back in. They will be their friends once we tell them our bring a friend program. You know, that is the art of promotion to me is a big part of retail now.
An amazing couple that I have been so blessed and so lucky to get to spend time with this last year are here to tell you all about working together. And not only working together, but how they have scaled an awesome business, maximizing systems and processes and love languages of their team members along the way. Anthony, I know you're so good at analyzing on the marketing piece, I would say like the SEO and the traffic and understanding like you said, is this model performing or is it the product that's performing all those pieces? Walk me through a day in the life of your brain when it comes to marketing and how you start to analyze those processes to help Amy better understand the social media and the marketing piece, but also the buying piece. What are the things you're looking for?
That's a big question, Ashley.
So margins.
Margins. It's, it's really. No, it's really just like. So I didn't have a background in boutique obviously as well, but I came from more of an analytical background in the agriculture industry. So it's really just finding like sometimes I come to work, it's like okay, what am I going to find today that could help? And then it's thinking through the process and figuring out okay, what metric would work well. And, and so sometimes it's a little non traditional in terms of like the verbiage the boutique uses and the marketing world uses, but a lot of it revolves around margin or you know, what's working in any of the social medias or email campaigns and you know, and then why did it work and how can we replicate it and grow that?
That's so good.
So do you guys, how do you communicate that on a daily basis? How do you take what you found and make changes and implement it and how do you argue it out when.
You disagree 247 all over. Just kidding. We do a metric meetings with our team and so once every two weeks we're meeting with each individual here and we have big goals as a team and then we break those up into action items every two weeks. So we just chink away at it. We have a big vision meeting planned here soon and I have two folders this big that scare everybody and he takes it to the team and breaks them down into little ones but we get there that way instead of the way that I have with the big folders. And so we just check in every two weeks. We all work on something together and individually and get those knocked off.
Yeah. So like a great example right now is the person that runs our website, we're working with some after purchase upsells. Right. And it's like you have all the options in the world to do and it's like, okay, so how do you, where do you start and then how do you get better at it? And it's just a lot of times it's honestly, and this is Amy's help but just starting, right? Just do the first thing you Know, like I can get ahead of myself and never start something because it's overwhelming or I'm just not quite sure how to do it. But just start it and then measure it and then get it better. So we're working with like after purchase upsells right now and figuring out the right combination of product to that complements whatever the customer's purchasing and then just increasing the upsell percentage a little bit, A little bit, A little bit. Until finally it's like, okay, I think we got this, we understand it and then moving on to the next thing. So that's like an example of something we would work through on our metric meetings.
Jane is not only a longtime member of the Hub and a part of our Mastermind, but also a speaker at the Boutique Summit and in past a speaker at Western Summit. I really value the, the background, the research and the knowledge that Jane brings to this conversation and every conversation that she's a part of on the business marketing topic. She's super analytical and she knows her stuff. So let's talk about some of those tricky things that keep you up at night. Changes in regulation in text message marketing and some of the other marketing channels in your business. Meet my friend Jane Casper. I feel like across so many channels in the last two years especially this has become an issue, whether it's with text marketing, whether it's with email marketing, whether it's with handicap accessibility on E commerce websites. We've seen more and more small businesses be taken to court or have, you know, a C and D at minimum sent to them for not having some of these basic boxes checked.
We'll say.
So talk to me specific about what has happened. There's been a number of lawsuits even with boutiques that we know for some of the practices they had with text marketing. Talk to me about those regulations and some things that we should all be looking for so that we don't get sued as well.
Okay. So TCPA compliance is. It is difficult because it's actually written out for telephone calls. And the issue with that is, is that sometimes there's a gray area. So for instance, like if you're in Florida, you have to be able to. It's stated as callback, but it can be legally digested as contact as well. Right. So you need to ensure that you have two way texting at minimum. If you don't have two way texting or Florida also has something in place where if they repeatedly try to reach you and you don't respond to them, that's also in violation of tcpa. So TCPA was put in place during the Ronald Reagan administration. And it's regarding telemarketing, right? Because we all remember when you're little and you know, it's like eight at night and the phone rings right after dinner and then your, your dad answers and you're like, oh, this poor soul, right? And he's like, it is 8 o' clock at night. And so now all you have to do is say like, hey, can you let me know how I opted in specifically? And then they take you off their list. Right, but that's where the do not calls list came into place. So there are regulations as far as when you can call all of the other states besides Washington and Florida, it's 8:00am to 8:00pm that means if you send out, if you live in Idaho, I live in Idaho. If you live in Idaho and you send out a text at 8:30 in the morning, it's 7:30 for all of your people in California, that's against the law. You cannot send a text message more than twice in a day. That is also against the law. For whatever reason, Florida has three times. And usually Florida is much more stringent on everything. But you also have to keep in mind that the autoresponders are included in that, right? So if someone abandons a cart and then you also send a text message in the morning and a text message at night, you're in violation. And there are safe, there are smart sending, like they say sending smart sending in most of these platforms. So you can set it like, if someone has received something in the last 16 hours, do not send a message. Right. And that's best practices for email. So that should already be in place on your email just to help prevent a high unsubscribe rate. But it's in place for legal reasons. On the texting side, my friend Emily.
McCarthy has not only built an amazing personal brand based off of her own designs, both in print and apparel, but she's also built a wonderful e commerce business and a growing brick and mortar business in Savannah, Georgia. She's done a great job of marrying the concepts of home and gift and lifestyle together with apparel. And her apparel line sells more in coterie than say, magic. How do you think? Like if someone's listening and they're weighing, man, should I, should I move from having my own brick and mortar, my own retail business business into designing my own pieces and having my own brand? What do you think are some pros and cons or things that people need to think about and weigh before they make that decision.
Are we talking about clothing in particular or just.
Yeah, well, clothing in particular, I would say. But if you also wanted to say clothing maybe versus home and gift products, what are pros and cons? If I should create my own line.
Gift, your risk is going to be a lot lower. Luckily, you know, there are so many companies in the US that provide a great, like, private label, like kind of. They call it like digital printing. So you can easily drop your own artwork into a lot of different products, and it allows you to take on very low inventory. You lose a little bit of quality control with that, like color consistencies and things like that. But we were able to have our own products in the store without ordering like thousands of each, say, coffee mug or tote bag. So it was kind of a great way to get into the product design without taking a huge risk. And if we only wanted to try six, say six placemats, we could only order six, which was nice, and we could test our customer. And I think that helped us figure out who our customer was, what they were buying. We learned a lot about quality control and the types of products that held up well and did not. So there's a low, a lower risk. There's obviously a lower return in that also, but it's a great way to get started. Clothing is a whole other animal, to be honest. There's a lot more that goes into the clothing than gift and paper and stationery. It's a, it's a big risk when it comes to minimums are going to be really high. It's one thing if you're taking existing fabrics and you're having garments made with like, fabrics that already exist. In our case, we're designing all of our own fabrics, so we have to have like printing minimum for printing. Our yardage, our solids are all like custom colored. Like, everything is custom printed specifically for our line. So you've got to have a certain amount of styles for fabrics. Even within those styles, you've got to have a certain minimum, like, you know, for like one top and three different colors. We have to reach a minimum for that. But it is really rewarding and it is really fun. I would say when you're mass producing the clothing, your margins are obviously going to be a lot higher and you do have the room to do wholesale. And I think setting your wholesale and your retails from the very beginning is so important, it's hard to think about, well, what do you think, say, this top will sell for? And you set a retail. But if you're not building in a wholesale margin in there from the beginning. Like, you can't really go backwards. Like, you've got to establish in the very beginning that you do want to expand the clothing line to, like, reach other retail businesses. So if you do want to manage a wholesale business and retail, like, you've got to build in your margins from the from day one.
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Sam.
