Five Minute Friday: Reshoot Restyle Repost

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Business can be a lonely game, but it doesn't have to be. Welcome to Boutique Chat where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek. We'll hear from product based businesses of all types, retailers, e commerce and wholesale brands, along with industry experts shaping the.

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I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat.

Hey guys, it's you and me back for a five minute Friday and I wanted to come with a really simple reminder that you probably already know this week. But it's what you need to do when you're looking at a ton of unsold inventory. Now here's the deal, I think, and no shame in this game, but so many of us in this industry, boutique owners, retail owners of all types, are a little bit of compulsive shoppers. Are you a compulsive shopper? You love to shop and you love to keep bringing in the new, right? Nothing wrong with that. Your customers love you for that, right? They admire your taste, they appreciate your curation. But the downside to being a compulsive shopper is we get so stuck on the hamster wheel of what's new that very quickly things become old in our mind. And they become old in our mind long before they become old in the minds of our customers. Now, if you're a live seller, seller, this is especially true for you because it feels like you have just this enhanced view of the energy around what's new and what's already been launched. And so what happens when we get in this trap and on this hamster wheel is we compulsively just keep buying and we look at all of our unsold inventory and rather than ask the very important question of, well, why didn't this inventory sell, instead we trick ourselves into thinking, well, I'll just buy something else and that'll hit better. Well, today I just invite you, if you want to run a leaner business and you want to drive a little bit more margin, become profitable and accomplish a whole lot more with a whole lot less, I want you to dig in and follow these three very simple steps. Actually, you know what, I'm going to give you four simple steps. I'm going to add on to what I had planned for you today. And the first thing is this first step is this. Are you accurately tracking the aging of your inventory? I have met with so many high end boutiques, like Million Dollar plus boutiques in the last few months. And this tends to be the thing I hear from them the most. Once they start to work with someone who's an inventory consultant, that kind of forces their hand at this. And they say, wow, I realized once I went back in and I understood what was my inventory on hand, what's my inventory on order? What is my accurate process for receiving inventory and launching inventory, then I had a better handle on what is my inventory aging? And when I look back at all my numbers, I realize I could be a lot more profitable with a lot less inventory because I was just stuck sitting on unsold inventory all the time. And inventory does not get better with age, right? It is bananas. When you receive the bananas, maybe they're green. And pretty soon, by the time you put the bananas out on the Internet and in your live sale and on your floor, bananas are yellow, right? It doesn't take long for you to have brown bananas. And either you've got one heck of a killer banana bread recipe or you just have mushrooms. And so I want to encourage you not to get mushed. So step number one is, how are you tracking the aging of inventory? Do you have your inventory categories right? Do you have that intake process that accurately summarizes dates? And do you have a date with your numbers every week to analyze what your aging report is telling you about? How brown are your bananas? Now, the second step in this process is the first part of the three Rs. Restyle, reshoot, repost. So step number one is, if I look at my unsold inventory and I've got the accurate tracking, and I've asked myself the question, why hasn't this sold right? Well, there may be a number of answers, right? It might be that it was the wrong timing. It might be the wrong merchandising. It might be that I only posted it once on a random Tuesday morning, and nobody saw it, but I considered it to be launched. So first thing is, I'm going to go back and I'm going to look at restyling it. So does it need to be restyled in a photo? Does it need to be restyled in my merchandising and on my mannequins? Does it need to simply be moved around my store? Does it need to be moved around my website? Do I need to restyle it in a live sale? Do I need to restyle how I am utilizing this product? Second is, do I need to fully reshoot it? Do I need to launch it as a new arrival? Do I need to say, hey, this is a, this is a restock that I just got back in because we've had so much demand. Do I need to restyle it then? Do I need to reshoot it and relaunch it now? Do I need to go in and repost it? If I looked at your social media account this week and I said, hey, if you sold a third of what you posted on social media this week, would it be enough to pay the bills? Because it should be right and then some. But most often I go through social media accounts of retailers and I find that they are hardly showing anything on social now. You only sell what you show. So if you're really hoping to drive a ton of FOMO and traffic and excitement back to your website, to your live sales, or to your storefront, you better show me what you have and what's new to drive that fear of missing out. For me, excitement about what's new. If I wasn't constantly posting new products on social, it would be like having one window display and then never re merchandising my window all year long. What would drive the excitement to actually get me to come into the door? Or when I first notice all the dead flies along the bottom of your windowsill? That's why we need to get busy restyling, reshooting and reposting and driving more excitement now as you go along, obviously you're going to get better at this process and you're going to understand there's things like T shirts, right, that are a pretty easy give. You don't typically need to restyle, reshoot them, put them in a fit video, but other products that are layering pieces, or maybe it's, you know, a transition from summer to fall where you need to start showing things in layers because we're not ready for tank tops any longer. Maybe that's a different consideration. Or maybe you're in home and gift and you need to start showing how some of your home and gift assortment from summer can transition to fall. How do you work those basic whites that you got in in the spring and make them a winter white come November and December? It is all about the process. There is money to be made in this process. So I encourage you, get off the hamster wheel, stop being a compulsive buyer, and start making more money from the existing inventory you have without constantly having to buy more by restyling, reshooting, and reposting. And it all comes from having a great process with understanding the aging of your inventory. That's it for this week's five Minute Friday. You guys, thanks for joining me. Be sure to leave a comment. Subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. If you're not a member of the Hub, it's where I spend all of my time talking to members, getting your feedback and doing tons of of coaching. So I will see you inside membership. Otherwise I'll see you back here for next week's 5 Minute Friday.

Thanks for listening guys. I hope you took away all kinds of nuggets and new ideas from this week's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and review. We love to hear your feedback and give you a chance to be featured on the show each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and to access guest downloads and bonuses and all the resources we talked about on the show, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.