#329: How Boutiques Can Prepare for the Holidays

Hey, guys. Welcome to episode number 328 with yours truly. We are going to have some really quick tips today that are going to get you ready for the holiday season.

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.

I have to tell you, one of the most common conversations I see happening in our industry right now is shipping delays and inventory issues and how on earth our industry is going to be ready for what's going to come during the holiday season. And so today I'm hoping as we can start the conversation all about what's to come, you're going to feel a little more prepared. You're going to feel like you can sleep a little bit better at night and you're going to have a plan as you walk into the fourth quarter. And I also want to preface today's conversation with this. This is just the beginning of this conversation. Our team, myself, Sarah, everyone who does coaching, Shannon, Jeff on our team have mapped out a plan where we will be live almost every single week for the next several months to help get you ready and make sure. This is the Beth. The Beth, the best fourth quarter yet. So be prepared. We've got tons more training to come, but I think this is the best place to start the conversation this year. And that is how can I mitigate the shipping and inventory issues by being a better inventory planner coming into the fourth quarter. All right, so here's where my head's at as we look at all the delays and all your favorite vendors and the new arrivals that you are banking on being in your store. The you can only sell what you have, right? You can only sell what you show. It makes you wonder what am I actually going to sell to get ahead this season? And so here's a couple things I want you to think about moving into. That is what categories and not just categories by way of tops and bottoms and accessories, jewelry. I don't mean categories like that. I mean what assortment categories am I really buying into? Because as boutique owners, especially if you're a women's apparel boutique, we are so hung up on the hamster wheel of women's fashion. We want what is new. Yesterday and if it came in two weeks ago, it's already old in many cases to us, because it's like we're compulsive shoppers. Like, can you raise your hand as you're listening to this podcast and go, hi, my name is Blank, and I'm a compulsive shopper. I think all of us in this industry fall into that category a little bit because we love what we do. But this year, it's going to be really imperative that we take a step back from that compulsive trend shift shopping and think about the assortment categories we're buying in. And so here's four categories I really want you to think about over the fourth quarter. And the first is trend. Now, some of your businesses maybe were more trend heavy. Some maybe not so much, depending if you were on a coast or in the Midwest or wherever you reside. But this year, I think our businesses are going to fight for who can get trend. And so when you're mapping out percentages of maybe, I typically buy 30% trend. Maybe this year it's only 20, maybe it's only 15. Maybe these other three categories step up and overtake what trend used to be for your business. So the first category is trend, and we all know what trend is. The second category to really think about here is margin. Where's my margin builder? And I say margin because I think one of the number one mistakes businesses make in the fourth quarter is we focus on gross sales and revenue more than we focus on margin. It is not about how much you sell. Let me repeat that. Over the fourth quarter it is. There's no award for who sells them up the most during the fourth quarter. There's no award for it. But who can be the most profitable? Now, that's something to hang your hat on. Who can work your butt off during the fourth quarter and still actually pay yourself at the end of the season? That is something to hang your hat on, because I know for so many of you, you get on this rat race of schedule for the fourth quarter and shipping all these packages and running all these promotions or sales, which is a bad word in my book. And you get to the end of the day and you're like, man, was it all for nothing? I skipped having Christmas dinner with my family or I skipped having Thanksgiving dinner with my family so I could focus on running the business. And at the end of the day, my bank account had nothing more to show for it in January. That's the number one mistake I want you to avoid. So as you're thinking about assortment planning when it comes to margin, it's things like, is there any off price your vendors have from previous years or anything that is out of season? Is there anything that you can find from the off price show? I know off price show has their own online wholesale platform now. Is there anyone you can connect with to buy their overstock in the boutique inventory exchange? Where can you go and find pieces?

Is that a bug in my hair? Those of you that are watching this live. Yeah, it was a. There's a bug in my hair.

What in the world? There was a beetle in my hair. You guys, if you're watching this on YouTube and I just want to squish.

It with my foot, but I won't. Oh, my gosh.

That happen?

There was a snake in my mailbox yesterday and today there was a beetle in my hair.

What is happening? Maybe I need a shower.

I don't know.

I digress. Okay, so margin. So off price show, that's a great place to get margin builders. Your vendors asking what overstock they have. But where can you find something that you can mark up at full, full price and still take a discount and still make money? That is the trick to getting great margin builders in your store. It's accessories, it's gift. It's things that you can put more markup on and keep more money at the end of the day. All right, third category to think about is what is your store's bread and butter? What is your store's bread and butter? What is the thing that really pays the bills? Where are you the most profitable? What is that category? But then I also want you to think about that category paired with what is your signature? What is the thing that people come to you for that they can't find anywhere else? Is it that you are a huge denim boutique? Right? You've got great selection of denim that other people don't have. Is it your signature style? Is that you're a western store, a western boutique that you do a huge business in pre nfr fashion? Is that your signature? Is it that you have a great selection of? Is where to work even a category anymore? Like that used to be such a huge boutique category, but post Covid, do we still even talk about where to work? I don't know, sweatpants, where to work, whatever it is, is that a huge category for you? So what is your bread and butter? What is your signature category? All right, and then the fourth piece, the fourth assortment piece that we're buying into is where are your upsells? What is my upsell category. And I also like to think about this in the fourth quarter as a seasonal category. So what is the thing? If someone comes to my store to buy a top and jeans, right? What else can I upsell them? Is it the jewelry? Is it the accessory line? Is it hats? Is it scarves? Is it outerwear? Is it gift? Is it drinkware? Is it beauty? What is my upsell category? Because the fourth quarter is the biggest quarter of the year when it comes to upsells and those add on sales that we have. How can we increase our average order value? How can we increase our units per transaction or upt in the fourth quarter so that we can make more margin and make more money at the end of the day? So just quickly to recap when we're thinking about buying in the fourth quarter, I want you to take a step back from trend for a minute and focus on four categories. Trend, yes, but slightly less because of the shipping and inventory issues we're having. Second is margin. Third is our bread and butter category or our signature categories. And then fourth is our upsell and seasonal category. You guys, I keep looking at the floor by my feet because I'm wondering if this beetle, this thing was giant.

If it's going to like crawl up my foot and slightly creeped out.

All right, so those are the four categories we're going to buy into for the fourth quarter. Now here's the second thing I really want to hit on. When you're thinking about mapping out the fourth quarter besides buying, here's the other place that you start. I want you to go get out your boutique boss planner. I know so many of you have boutique boss planners or maybe you have just a plain old day planner that has a blank calendar in it. If you have the boutique boss planner, it comes with checklists and to do lists and inventory tracking and all these things. So you've got extras, but any calendar will do at this point. I want you to lay out your calendar and look at September, October, November, December. And then I want you to start with this process. I want you to go in and circle the biggest holidays. So Pink Friday, which is the Friday before Black Friday, where we shop small first, it is a holiday for boutiques. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday your Scrooge night if you do that, or a ladies night if you do that. If you have any holiday pop ups, plan that out. What does your biggest days of the fourth quarter look like? I want you to circle those first. Then next, after you go through that process, I want you to think about all those events that you have planned and then make your checklist of what Facebook events do I need to create, what graphics do I need to create, what photo shoots do I need to host that are maybe seasonal? And I need to buy props for what emails need to be planned. What other accounts can I possibly collaborate with? So. So if I'm a brick and mortar boutique and I want to bring in some handmade artisans for my ladies night out, now is the time to plan that out and put it on my to do list. If I'm an online store and I'm going to have a huge digital shopping week where I'm going to promote, like, my holiday collection, my Black Friday promotion collection, like, whatever it might be, what is my biggest push of the season? I'm going to map all that out, get those emails planned, my Facebook events plan, my photo shoots plan planned, the graphics planned, and any collaborations planned. What other accounts can I collaborate with? Now the next step and final step is going in. And after I've got all those dates planned, I can then mark them down on the calendar. So if I have an event coming on Pink Friday, I know that I need to send out emails the Friday prior and then probably the Tuesday prior and then the morning of. And so I've got those dates mapped out. Once I've got all those dates, my photo shoots, my inventory, when I know inventory is going to be arriving, if I have all that mapped out on the calendar, then the last thing that I do is I sit down. Just like I would on every single Monday of the week, right? Every single Monday, I would sit down and actually map out the detailed social media. But when you get to that point, it is so overwhelming. In the fourth quarter, I know we're all running 900 miles an hour, and you don't want to have to plan the whole thing week by week. You want to sit down and plan the biggest events and work your way backwards right now. And so that as you get to every Monday during the fourth quarter, boom, you can execute. Boom, you can schedule posts. Boom, you can get those emails put into your email system and get them sent by smart segments, right? And we're not just blasting everyone with a fire hose on Black Friday, hoping we're going to get some traffic for some silly sale that we're going to give away the diamonds and the dirt with on Black Friday. So plan that out. Now, the third tip I want to give you, as you're thinking about mapping out this entire season and maximizing the holiday season, is promotions versus sales. Now, I've built an entire system around this. It's inside of our holiday marketing masterclass where I map out all the most successful types of promotions to help you make the most money during the fourth quarter. Because a lot of times when we get tired and we get a little bit lazy because we got too many things on our plate, we're like, I'll just slap a 20% off site wide sale up there. What happens when we do that is we sell the diamonds in the dirt, right? Everyone comes to our website and rather than buying the things that we planned for them to buy, right, we bought deeper in Judy Blue because we knew that was going to go big. Or maybe we had overstock that we wanted to sell, maybe we had the off price pieces we really wanted to push. But instead, when we slap up 20% off site wide, what happens is someone comes to our new arrivals category and those nicest margin building sweaters that we bought for the fourth quarter, they're gone. But everything else you plan still remains. So the most important tip when it comes to planning how you're going to do promotions is think about what is the promotion which drives traffic, it drives awareness, and it drives a goodwill effort that creates an emotional reaction with your customer. What is a promotion versus what's a stone cold sale? A blanket sale where we lazily slap 20% off site wide. That does not really accomplish the goal. We have a focusing more on margin versus focusing more on sales and revenue. So just to recap our super short holiday tips episode today, the first is avoid all of the shipping and inventory nightmare by not relying solely on trend in the fourth quarter and instead buy into four buckets, trend margin, bread and butter and then upsells or seasonal. The second is to get the calendar out now, map out the biggest holidays and work your way backwards so you have a skeleton of a plan that you can work from every single week. And then third, making sure that we are running promotions and not sales. You guys, today's episode was super short, super sweet and I hope it drove a ton of value. If you love episodes like this, please hit me up on Instagram. It's ajalderson and I would love your feedback if you have a question. And just so you know, I have a very special episode planned for you guys because I want to include you in the podcast. So if you have a question that you would like for me to answer on the air, please use the link in today's show notes we have a link for you where you can drop your store information and your question and we can feature you on the podcast. I would love to see you guys drop some questions so that I can answer them on the podcast. So you've got homework. Send me your question through the link and then if you love this solo episode and super short, super sweet, super tactful and tangible episodes like this, send me a message on Instagram. It's AJ Alderson. I am there to video chat with you any time. You guys. Thanks for listening today. Thanks for being here. I've got tons more holiday tips planned if you haven't already taken my signature program All About Holiday marketing. It is holidaymarketingmasterclass.com and there's tons of tips coming every single week for members of btca. You guys have a great week. We will be back with you soon.

Hey guys, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope that you loved it. Don't forget to hit subscribe and leave a rating and review down below for a chance to be one of our featured listeners each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and how to access complete show notes and bonus downloads from our guests, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community.

We'll see you next time.

Weekend.