How to Be a Better Buyer

Foreign. Knowledge with you today as well. So part of the purpose today here as we jump into just talking about being a better buyer, this is a collaborative effort today between Hubentory, the wholesale platform, as well as the boutique hub. And we want to get you some actual, like, real life data and strategy as well as talk about working with your vendors and all the different platforms that you're using on a daily basis as well. So, Sarah, let's get into the meat and potatoes and talk from the start about being a better buyer.

Oh, I love it.

I love it.

Okay, so we get questions all the time here at the Botique Hubs, and a lot of times they're like big, big sky questions like, I need more sales or I need to get more customers in my door, and I don't know how much to go buy. What should I go buy at market? Those are the things people want to start off thinking about. And really we, we like to go further down the road than that. We like to look backwards and say, okay, who exactly is your customer? Who are you buying for? And sometimes we get a little excited and put the cart before the horse, so to speak, and want to go source products that we like. Right. Things that we think are going to be great for our area, but yet we haven't really defined who our customer is. So there's a lot of different things that we're going to get into when we talk about that, like who exactly is our customer? What do they need from us? What do they want from us? What can they expect from us, and how do we show up for them every single day? So in the chat, I would love for you guys to just take a moment and put in the chat, who is your customer? What is your customer? He or she? What is. What do they like? What, what, what are the things that, you know, relate to them? We often build up this customer Persona. We're going to talk about that here in just a second. But who is your customer? I see, I see people dropping in the chat. Let's see. Younger, older, what do we got? Let's see. Actually, you want to go ahead and advance that slide for me? All right, perfect. So one of the things a lot of times people say is, okay, who's my customer? Well, how do I know? How do I know who my customer is? How do I know who I'm actually targeting? And if it's. I think it's really kind of fun to sit back and figure this out, because ultimately, this is where you're going to be spending your money. This is where you're going to be going out and sourcing all of these products. So how do you do that? Well, we can, we can do a few surveys, we can do some polls, we can, you know, just obviously do roundtable discussions. Ask, you know, when customers come in or you're talking to different people, just ask them questions. Listen, right, listen. What is, what is happening in the industry? What are they liking? What are they not liking? What are some of their pain points? We love to, we love to talk about making your customer the main character of your story now. So what does that mean? Your business, your business is overall like a, like a big book, like a story being told. And the main customer is, is your main character. So ultimately lots of focus on this customer. Everything in the story goes back to the customer. Everything in the story goes back to that main character. So when you go to market, when you go down to Hubventory and you go to source these products, ultimately you have to think, is my, is this relevant to my customer? Does it meet their needs, their wants, their desires? Does it help them live their better life? All of these things, what problem does it solve for their, for this customer? Because people pay money to have their problem solved, right? That's, that's so important. I bet you today jumped on a platform or went into a store recently and you bought a product or went into that store, onto that website for a sole purpose of finding something that served a need that solved a problem that you had. So everything that we source needs to come back to that. How do you figure that out? Again, listen to your customers, ask the tough questions. We are, I would say, the biggest issue in our industry. We are faced with a lot of, a lot of options, right? Your customer, there's no such thing as the scarcity. Ash is going to talk a little bit more here in a second about the, another big issue in our industry, but through your customer's eyes. If you sit back and think about who they are, busy moms, wants fashion, but wants to be comfortable, cute, affordable things, all of those things. They like to listen to music, they like to go out, they like to sit on patios, they love to spend time with their children. I'm just able to read a few of these things as they're scrolling by, but looking at those are that, that purchase that you might be going to make that investment into inventory and think, does it satisfy these needs? Have that like checklist, make like a rubric. What is going to satisfy X, Y and Z for my customer? And that's how you start to know if you're solving their product, their problems, and you're going to. This product is going to fit into their lifestyle.

Yeah. Sarah, I want to take it even a step further. So you talked about, like, we're really writing this story. We're telling a story about our customer, who's the main character, Right? But does every great story have in common? There's a hero and there's a villain, Right? And so when you're thinking about your customer, some of you did such a great job in the chat. You guys scroll through these and look. Some of you did a really great job of really defining your customer. And you did define your customer as the hero overcoming some villain, right? She struggles with time. She struggles with body image. She struggles financially. You know, what is the issue that she's facing? What is the problem that you are going to help her solve? Because when she overcomes something, she defeats the villain and she's the hero. You become the wise guide in the journey. Right? If you guys have followed Donald Miller and Story brand, they talk a lot about how can you be Yoda to Luke Skywalker, your customer, and you're going to defeat Darth Vader, right? So when some of you put in the chat, my Customer is age 15 to 97. I serve everyone. I just want to make you pause for a second and go, okay. But when you target everyone, you reach no one. So how can you break that down and out of that one big group, make four different smaller customer avatars? You can speak very, very specifically and individually to your customer. Those of you who have been a part of the boutique hub and been a part of retail boot camp, we do a lot of surveying. That's something we're going to be going through in retail boot Camp actually tomorrow. And some. Some tools. I know someone just asked us in the chat, Google forms or type form, or those of you who have a Facebook group, just doing some polling of your customers. The more questions you can ask to really dig down, the better, because it's going to help you ultimately become a better buyer. And we're gonna. We're gonna get more into that in a minute. The last bullet point on this slide that Sarah was talking about was what is the biggest issue in our industry today? I'm curious in the chat what you guys think that is. Before I give you my. My two cents, what do you think is the biggest issue in our industry today? Curious. Let's see it.

Amazon. Amazon. Oversaturation.

Timu Sheen. Yeah. Oh, so. Oh, you guys are on it. You're on it. All right. So there's some change taking place in our industry right now. Right. There's some new options that people have that they're shopping and maybe they're choosing to shop those options over us. Maybe there's over saturation. You're right. Maybe everyone's kind of looking the same. We aren't really standing out. But, you know, if you're going to go to you, your investment banker, right, you're going to talk about putting money into your 401k or some kind of retirement, what are they going to tell you about the stock market? When's the best time to make money in the stock market? Right. You're going to buy low and you're going to sell high. You're going to buy when it's down. Right. You're going to double down when there's an opportunity. And when I look at the biggest issue in our industry today, yes, there's all kinds of new places. People are shopping. Everyone is starting to look the same. To me, that is the biggest, like, waving flag of opportunity for you to start to stand out and for you to start to look a little bit different and to be ahead of the pack moving forward. So your buying is the number one way that you're going to start to do that. It's how you're going to start to look different than everyone else and really avoid all of the oversaturation and avoid the sheens and avoid the team use and instead make a brand and make a community that your customer keeps wanting to go back to. They think of you first when they start to buy. So let's get into the nuts and bolts of it. Let's talk about inventory planning specifically. I'm curious how many of you guys in the chat really love inventory reports? Or if you're like, oh, I just. I just go with my gut.

I just go with my gut.

I'd love to hear your honesty, Sarah. Let's talk about inventory planning before you buy. How do you just first get started? What's the right move?

Oh, gosh. Well, for all of you guys that have listened to me in retail boot camp and inside the boutique hub, I often will talk about inventory planning and just say, look, you guys have been planning inventory a long time. You might not even know it. And one of those analogies is when you go to the grocery store, you guys are planning your inventory. You are planning what you're going to go source and have on hand for a set period of time to accommodate the needs of your customers. Those customers are your family or whoever eats in your, at your house, right? Maybe it's your roommates, whatever it might be. Maybe it's just you personally, what is it you are going to consume and need that you're going to invest in and a specific time for a specific need. And you're going to consume it before it expires, before it ages out. So it does. It's not a waste of money. So when you are, you're like, okay, I get that. Yes, I know exactly what you mean. When I go to plan for lunches and dinners and breakfast and I need the staple products and I need that. No, gosh, okay, that looks really fun. I'm going to try that. Or that's in the impulse aisle as I'm walking through, waiting to pay. I'm going to buy a candy bar, right, because you have a little money left over and you can. That's inventory planning. And we do it on a daily. We do it for so many things. But now when you're going to build a business, right, okay, now we're talking tens of thousands of dollars we're investing. So it does feel more pressure, it feels more heavy. So this is where your planning really comes into place. You assign this budget. But first of all, are you assigning inventory classes? And those classes should be telling you a story. So what does that mean? Well, again, in the food analogy, right, maybe you could say it's breakfast, lunch and dinner. But let's go further than that, right? What is the number one product that you consume in your household? Maybe say for breakfast, meat. Is it, is it bacon? Is it sausage? Is it ham? What is it? And that, because of that, because you know that is broken up into that sort of inventory class, you're able to go feed that class now in your store. Maybe it is candles, maybe it is. Maybe it's layering pieces, maybe it's special occasion dresses, maybe it's, it's just basics. What are those categories that really feed your pocketbook that your customers are, are constantly coming in that you need to feed consistently? And when I say feed, I mean those are your classes that really, you can't let those go dry. You can't run out of product there because those are things people are constantly.

Coming to you for.

You also are going to have some, you know, trend and impulse buys. And those are fun. Those are great. But the reality is when you look at your inventory classes and there it's telling you break that down, those sale numbers, or lack thereof, sale numbers, that's another big thing. Are going to tell you a story. Where do I want to focus when I jump on Hubventory today? When I jump go to market in Dallas or Vegas or whatever it is, where am I spending the majority of my time? What do I have to make sure I check off my list that I've purchased before I can jump into some of these other maybe fun things. So like we, we do go into this a ton inside retail boot camp and we have number of resources and handbooks that can guide through this even deeper. But we want to plant the seed to really get to thinking about this today. You know, I'd love to see in some of the comments what are some of those inventory classes that you currently have in your store or in your offering? I'll, I'll give you some of mine. Mine were, you know, dresses were a big thing, but I also divided that up in dresses, day dresses and evening dresses because we did a very strong dress business but for two type different reasons.

Right.

Our accessories were very, very strong. But our jewelry, we separated from our jewelry and accessories so we were able to track those things. Shoes, lots of shoes in, in inside the retail boot camp or inside, inside our membership. And we talk about the shoes and how fast those shoes are turning and what, what they need or what we do with us in our store and what the sell through is. And when we analyze those, that story tells us how many we need to have on hand to support the sales, the sales numbers that are coming in. So inventory by classes and telling your story, extremely important, not negotiable. There's resources out there. Oola is on here with Faves. Great resource with Faves Pro app that is able to divide your inventory. You're able to set inventory type classes and fill your budgets, feed your budgets, so to speak. So you source the inventory inventory that's necessary for your store so you don't end up with a ton of, you know, bedazzled sparkly bralettes.

Right?

When your consumer is only going to be able to purchase so many of those, then you don't have money left over for your basics. So that's what the inventory classes are. And then planning your next buy based on that data and current sell through. So once you break those up into your inventory classes and you start analyzing your sales, how much you've discounted in those in those departments, what you're selling, what you're sitting on, what's aging, you're able to then make those decisions. Like I said, as soon as you get on the store floor or the, the showroom floor at Dallas or Atlanta or wherever, you know, where you want to focus. When you go back and set time each week to be a better buyer and invest in inventory for your store, you know what categories you need to be feeding, what categories you need to fix. Maybe ones that are, have a slow sell through, maybe ones that you know, you know, have potential, but just they're not hitting right now. And then the ones that you need to forget, the ones that you need to say, oh man, I love the heck out of this type of product, but my customers are not. I mean, I got to forget about it because it's tying up my dollars. So then those, once you start looking at your inventory that way versus just something really fun and cute and you start realizing that's your, your dollars put to work.

Right.

You, it's really important to set up those budgets and what those budgets will allow you to do is say, I know if I'm gain, if I'm aiming to sell $20,000 worth of inventory this month, this week, whatever it is. And 60% of my sales are coming from dresses. I'm a very dress driven store. 60% of my sales are coming from my home decor and gift section specifically. Specifically children's home decor and gifts. Gosh. That budget becomes very clear when you're setting down and saying I have this amount of money to spend. I know I need to go back and feed these categories first.

So good. Sarah, I just want to point out a couple things from the chat someone had mentioned. You know, this is eye opening. I actually start to budget by brand first and this is a complete shift because you can't hardly budget by brand if you don't know what is actually selling within the brand. You have to have all the classes. Those of you who are on Shopify, you might look at this as product type. So every POS system is going to name this a little bit different. But product type is how you would first start to break this down. Sarah, are there other reports people should be looking at to really analyze when they're setting up their budget?

Yeah. So like your aging inventory mentioned that your discounts and your aging inventory very, very important. Because here's the thing that I in inside the boutique boss planner we, we have a whole chart where you can analyze your sales versus the inventory. So it's one thing to look and say, okay, I did this many dollars in sales, but how long did it take you to do those sales and at what discount did those end up finally selling, that's one thing that's really eye opening because a lot of times I'll talk to stores and they'll say, oh, I don't have any of that product left. We must have done, we did amazing with it. I don't see. We don't have any of it left on the store floor, so we've got to go buy it again.

Well.

Often what happens is when we really look at it and think, oh man, we got six of those in, one sold at full price and we had to get rid of the rest of them at 30 to 75% off. Okay, so to say you've sold through it, does that define success to you or does that define a product that needs to be fixed or forgotten about?

Right.

And it, there's all sorts of reasons it might not have sold at full price. But nonetheless, when you go through and you analyze these, these reports, I love sales, but say it cannot just be sales. We have got to look at how old that inventory was it, how long it took to sell, right? And then also like, what discounts were, did we have to implement to get that product to move? Those are really, really important things.

Sarah, real quick question from the chat. What, what if that product, even at a discount, isn't selling? Real quick, let's talk about just what is the process of marking that down and really getting your cash back out as quickly as possible?

Oh, gosh, you guys, I say, I, this is the never. I mean, there's no one answer to this at all. I gosh, to say, read the play and adjust accordingly. Maybe sounds like I'm coaching a basketball team, but it, it, I feel like in this day and age, that's the best advice. So I, I love to say, constantly be evaluating inventory. When you make a product release or a launch, you've. All right, let's back up. Let's say you've done your homework. I'm just going to paint this picture. So you've done your homework. You go to market. We talked about this a second ago. You go to market, you know what you're going to be buying? You, you're buying something that you in your heart of hearts believes it serves a purpose for your customer, the main character of your story, right? You've hyped up that product. Maybe you went to market and you said this or that at market, and they all said this. And so you, you invested in it, right? You tell them, hey, it's coming, it's launching on Wednesday. It's going to be here. You've done a live sale with it, you've done the fit video with it, you've made reels, you've done all the things, you've given it all the love and attention you possibly can give it. And it has not sold. The immediate. I mean, I'm talking like within the first couple of days, it has not sold. We have a problem. We have to go back and really reassess the existence of that product. So if that does not make it, if all those things has not gained attention, was it priced wrong?

Right?

Do we, Are we not showing its features and its benefits? What, what might be happening with that? So I, I tell you this backstory because all of those things matter. They all matter. You can't just go ahead and say, oh, it's been here for a week. Let's market at 20% off that. That doesn't work. Right. We have to learn from every one of our maybe buying mistakes or our products that are not selling. Everything tells a story, so we have to use that data to tell that story. But if you want a general over just umbrella look at markdowns at the end of a week of a product being there, take a look at it. What, What. How much is sold, how much has not. Why has it not. Has it made it into the dressing room? People haven't bought it. Did it end up in any carts on your website and people didn't convert, what happened? But at four weeks, we really, really need to be making, making a move on those things. And I like to see, I like to see that turning over for sure by six weeks. So whatever that price might be, you guys, that's going to be unique to your business. But I'm a firm believer that if you invest in something, you bring something into your store and it's not moving and you've done all the things that you possibly can do to make it move. And it's still sitting there, man. Own it. Say this was, you know, my loss, your gain. Price it to move, make it go away, Take that cash, reinvest it back in something else. Be aggressive with your markdowns. Don't fall in love with your products. Don't fall in love and get emotionally attached to them. And they grow, you know, bigger and longer and wider on your racks or your hangers. Make a move quickly.

I love it.

Good advice, good advice. All right. One more thing I added to this. Oh, Lindsay says loved products don't pay rent. That is so amazing. Yes. That's so good, Sarah. One more thing I added to this Slide that. I, you know, just another perspective. Just thinking about the four part assortment plan. You talked about going to the grocery store earlier. So in the vein of that analogy, you know, we can look at our reports, we can look at product types or inventory classifications and what's working and what's not. But overall, I would love just for you guys to all look at your inventory also through this four part assortment plan, as if you're going to the grocery store, right? So there's a certain part of our grocery store trip that I'll call trend product. Like we all have trendy product in our stores. To me, that's going to the grocery store and it's the charcuterie board section. Like, I know Samantha, you're a big entertainer, you have a lot of guests over, but if you only went to the charcuterie board section, your girls would be killing you. Like, where's the meat? Where's the bread and the eggs and the rest of the stuff that we need to survive, right? So when we're just buying trend, but we aren't buying, you know, full looks or full assortments to go along with the trend, we're missing out. So trend is the first piece of our four part assortment plan. The second is bread and butter. And Sarah, that's you talking about, you know, I'm running my reports, what's actually selling, but what's selling in the right turn and at full margin. That's my bread and butter. That pays my bills. For me, it's iced coffee. When I go to the grocery store, I cannot leave the grocery store without it. It's my bread and butter. I have to have it. What is that for you and your business? The third piece of the assortment plan is my margin builder. So when I go to the grocery store, I'm looking at what's in the little newspaper they throw in my cart that's on sale, right? Oh, it's Jack's Pizzas. Great. I'm going to buy even more Jack's pizzas right now because they're on sale and if I'm not home, you know, my family must cook something to survive. And it's Jack's Pizza. So in your business, what is that? You know, just as an example, today, this morning I was talking to Gene from White Birch. Some of you may do some business with Gene and he's running a huge like inventory sale right now. Just moving out things at a steep discount that are leftovers to me. That's. That's your margin builder. That's your coupon section you can go and get great deals, flip it for a really high margin and, and put some of that money in your pocket at the end of the day. And then the fourth piece of this assortment plan is you get all the way through the grocery store, you get to the checkout, you get to the register and your kids have now added in 14 extra things to your cart. Right? All the crap at the end, it's the little like to go cups of puppy chow and it's a pop and it's whatever else. So what is that in your business? What's the add on? What's the upsell? What's the opportunity to bundle? What's the opportunity for a quick gift as we're getting to Mother's Day and graduation and all these holidays. Do you have that in your business or are you just stuck on trend and you're still just trying to sell the like cranberry flavored cheese that no one's ever gonna eat, Right? So we've got to have like the full look when you look across your inventory for things really to work together for you to have a full assortment and ultimately to make enough money to, to build a sustainable business.

Yeah, I absolutely love that. And those impulse buys guys, those are important. So this is where when we talk about and this is, this is deeper than what this webinar is going to go into you guys and we, this is why we partner here at the Botique Hub. We have our membership. These are ongoing everyday conversations inside our membership. Inventory investing open to buy planning. But how to budget specifically to leave enough money on in your budget to source those, those impulse buys because those impulse buys increase your average order value. Remember when you go into retail, you're not in the business to sell one pain staking item at a time. That is exhausting. You want people to check out with multiple items. You want your average order value. You know, you want that increasing. You want that units per transaction increasing. You want to have set measurables and standards for you and your staff that you reach. So you reach those big audacious goals that you set for your business. And impulse buys are a huge part of that. You cannot buy what you cannot find. You cannot, you cannot sell what you cannot find. Right. You cannot sell products that you can't easily grab and, and show your customers or ones that they cannot easily grab. Whether that's online add to my cart other customers, similar customers bought something like this. Those kind of add ons, those really make a difference in your bottom line. Every dollar counts so when you are putting these budgets together, making sure you leave some money on the table for those four types of categories of assortment that we just talked about is really important. That's like the, the full on recipe for success of inventory planning. Because if you're too heavy in one thing, you are going to, eventually you're going to miss out on upsells, obviously, but those customers are going to get a little bit bored. They're going to get a little bit stagnant. You need to introduce the whole boutique idea. The whole shop small first idea is discovery.

Right?

Who, when you guys talk, and I saw it earlier in the chat, I've got three chats pulled up here. But I you. The word unique is a huge part of this business.

Yeah, right.

We want to set ourselves apart from other people and other businesses in the big box stores and we want it. We're over there saying, hey, shop small first. Shop small first. And they're saying, all right, give me something new. Show me something I've not seen before. So that's where this inventory planning and investing really. And what we want to show you today is so exciting. But you got to have the cash available to do it. So budgeting is really important. All right, let's, let's jump in. These are just some basic housekeeping when it comes to investing in inventory. Now some of you guys are going to say, okay, I totally understand this. Some of you guys are going to say, this is a, this is brand new. But I will say, knowing your customer, remember that main character of your story, right. And who they are, they might be telling you a story that your business is set up to serve size 12 and beyond. Or it might be set up on extra smalls and smalls only. Right. You might have that audience that is your core customer. Or if your home decor and gift you maybe one specific type of home decor that's very, very common. Well, when it comes to investing in inventory, you want to have really good conversations and relationships with your vendors. So you know how, when you order something, how is it packaged? How is it going to be delivered? Are we talking about if I say yes to this specific sweater, I have to get 12 of them or do I get four of them or do I just get the one that I wanted? So there's pre packs versus open packs. And so, and I'll just say in, in our, in this handbook we have, we have this awesome how to buy wholesale handbook and there's a whole section in here on, on this and size runs and what pre packs look like and all of those kind of things. So if you are a beginner I highly, highly recommend this, this product. It, it, it, it will outline all of these things for you. But a pre pack typically is, it's done to benefit the wholesaler. They can manufacture and they can put together a pack and that keeps their cost down. Right. So it maybe is a 1 2, 211 small, 1 medium, 2 larges, 2 extra larges. Or maybe it starts and it goes up to an extra large. Maybe it's two to two starting at a small, two smalls, two mediums, two larges. Every not there's a, there's a variety of different packs. They're all pretty much you know, 222-1221 things like that. But then there's also the add on extra largest pack or the, the plus size packs. So you want to know what am I investing in when I say yes like I said to that sweater, that dress, how many of them I going to get? Now the open orders. This is a really open. This is awesome. And has a place in your business as well. And on Hub and Toy. We'll show you here in a minute. One of the cool things when you go into Hub and Tori onto this platform you can source just open or orders open sizes.

Right.

Love that, love that. So that way if you know you don't want smalls or mediums in your store, you don't have to get them right. Or if you the other way around. Now understanding the sizes, this is a big one and I there used to be back when I started in retail in the 90s, there was pretty much universal sizing. One of the things I really encourage you to do when you have these relationships and you're investing in your inventory is understand what vendors small really means. What does that small actually fit? What does it look like? And you know I always teach when you are in, when you're in a booth at a market and you ask a vendor like okay what what would I wear? What size does this body wear in your products?

Right.

Or when you are, when you're sourcing home decor and gift, size matters. Pictures can look totally different and you get something in and the size makes a huge difference on all your home decor and gifts. So really understanding the difference in sizes, understanding the difference in fabrics, what is going to fit? What body style, how are you going to wash it, how are you going to all of the things that depends on does it again fit the lifestyle of your customer, fit their wants and their needs. There's so many different fabrics out there. Some of them are absolutely amazing, some of them picture take photos of amazing, right? You get them in the feel and you're like, oh, this is a texture situation that's going to affect your sell through or your return rate. So understanding what we're looking for and know what your customer really wants, then understanding wholesale costs. When you walk into the showroom or into a temp booth or you find yourself on Hubventory and you're sourcing products, you want to understand, like, where's my opportunity, my retail return on investment here? What can I make off this product? What is this? You know, does it check all the boxes? Is it going to serve the needs of my customers? And then you go back and you look at the wholesale cost so you see what type of return you're going to make on this product. We have a really cool tool inside Hubventory that takes the guessing game out of that, which I absolutely love. We'll talk a little bit more about that. But understand, you are not selling at wholesale. For all of you guys just getting started that want to say you want to be the most affordable place, you still have got to pay your taxes, you have got to pay yourself. You've got to pay all the fees that go along with running a business. All, all the legal things. All of business is expensive. So you as a retailer are not selling at wholesale cost. That is that. And you don't want to sell a couple dollars over wholesale costs. You have got to, you're in this business to make money, right? And you're in this business to, to serve your customers. And you cannot serve your customers long term if you don't have money to support your efforts. So that brings me to the last one here. And that's pricing for profit. Again. I talked about that just a second ago. Understanding what it is you're investing in and what is the value of that product. Your pricing, you guys, your pricing needs to absorb, obviously the cost of the product, but it needs to absorb the discounts because discounts are inevitable. You do not want to go in and be naive and think everything you're going to invest in is going to sell at whole price, at full price. So it's got to absorb some discounts, but it also needs to absorb your profit. And your profit is extremely important. That's what keeps the lights on. That's what keeps you getting out of bed every morning. That's what, you know, that's what pays the taxes, all of those things, all that money coming in because if it doesn't, if you don't have profit built in there. I've seen it happen before that people will kind of rob Peter to pay Paul and justify certain things, and then the IRS doesn't get paid and you don't get paid, and neither one of those are good things. So pricing for profit is extremely important. And just, I would love to take a big old mind eraser to everybody that says, I just want to be affordable for my, my people. I want to, I want to make sure that they can afford my products. And I don't make assumptions about your customers. And remember, they will remember that quality and that service that you provide for them. The price of something they will forget.

Oh, Sarah, so good. I. I've got to jump in on this because this is something I hear a lot like, I'm just going to be a, you know, a trendy online affordable boutique or whatever it is. You know, my customer is also shopping on Sheen and Teemu. So I've got to be affordable. You can't compete with that. Right? I always say cheap ain't loyal. Cheap ain't loyal. If your customer wants something cheap, they're gonna go to Sheen, they're gonna go to Timo, they're gonna go to Walmart. But that's not your customer. You know, I think about just even the economy today, how many of you guys have been in an airport recently or you've been on vacation recently? Was it a ghost town? No, it wasn't a ghost town. Like, was it packed? Yeah, it was probably packed. People are spending money like crazy. There is money out there, right? But people are just making different choices about how they're spending it. They want quality, they want a community, they want relationship. Right. I was reading earlier today, I think the estimated economic impact of Taylor Swift, dare I even say it, before everyone's hair lights on fire right now, was $5 billion last year on just economic impact when people go into her shows, right? And who even knows with the super bowl how much, like, crazier that's about to get. People are spending money, so how do we get them to spend more money with you? And it's not because you're going to be the cheapest joint in town. That's not why they're going to do it. It's because of what you're going to offer, how you're going to offer it, and the community that you're going to build around your brand, for sure. All right, Samantha, let's talk about this. So we talked about just some Some be a better buyer strategy. But let's talk about where you're going and I'm curious those of you before Samantha gets started, where you guys are, are buying right now, what markets are you going to, how are you shopping online, what is your go to strategy right now for getting inventory and then Samantha's going to give you kind of lay of the land of, of opportunity, how to work with vendors and some different, different ways to shop right now.

Yeah, I'm excited. This is, this is what I'm passionate about. So you know, getting together and getting that inventory for your store, you know there's two major ways. One is those inter in person trade shows and looking at the comments lighting up with Atlanta, Dallas, I saw New York, Vegas. So make sure you find us. Our team will be at all of those shows. The way that the apparel markets work is that Dallas and Atlanta, they have five major shows, a course. There's also home and gift that come into play. And then Vegas also has a twice a year show. Nashville is now a location for magic as well as Miami. So there's lots of opportunities based on you know, what brand you shop with and then where you're located, geographically where you want to attend. Everybody that you know, if you're a hub member, you know that we are at those shows and we're there to support you. And my advice for when you go to market, of course like Sarah said, go with the plan, know what you need to get, take your grocery list with you. But also to be thinking about that inventory is really like a fashion diet, right? So like she said, we got the bread and butter, those things that are pay the bills all the way up to maybe the fast fashion which is kind of that fast fast food that the treats. So my advice when you go to markets to shop too is to stop, start at the top of the building and shop down. So start in those showrooms and stop, go all the way down and see everything there is to see but some just some basics. So for those of you that are new, how do you get registered for a show? People want to know that too, like how do I get in the door at these markets. So first things first, we have these resources on the boutiqueup.com we do a blog post for every major market and let you know how to register, what to look for and that kind of thing. But it's really as simple as you're going to go to the website for that show. They will want to make sure that you are a vetted buyer. So that lets Them know that there's not people coming in off the street and accessing these wholesale prices and then selling it right at wholesale, you know, out of their, out of the car or that kind of thing. So you will have to provide your tax ID and they want to see your license and then probably some receipts as well to show that you've purchased wholesale in the past. When I talk about shopping market from the top down, at the top is where most of those showrooms are. And so showroom brands are going to have sales reps that will work with you. You can tell them about your store, you can tell them about your customer, tell them what it is you're looking for as far as price point, ship dates, sizing, open pack, pre order, that kind of thing. And they're going to make that connection to get you with the very best products that will sell through. That's their goal. And then we also have temporary booths, which is like how the name suggests, they're popping up at the show. So they don't have a permanent location at the market. Instead they travel from market to market and set up their temporary booth and load their samples. They've got a whole team there to work with you. And like Ashley was talking about earlier, White Birch is one of our partners. You will find White Birch in a temporary booth and they also will build relationships with you as well. That's one of the advantages of being a boutique hub member is getting to know those, those decision makers and building those relationships. Okay, so once you're in the building, you registered, you walked in, you've got your plan, you know what you want to buy and now it's time to start working with those vendors. And so something that we teach when we go to markets is really taking time to do exploration and discovery on those first couple days of the show. So definitely that first day you're going to go around, you're going to ask questions. Main questions I would ask for sure is we want to know ship dates. So when is this product going to arrive? We want to know if it's open pack or if it's pre packed. So you'll know, like Sarah said, are you going to end up with a lot of extra larges and maybe your customer doesn't wear that. Do you need to have plus sizes? So you're going to need to get into that with the, with the vendors and ask them those questions. They're used to these questions. They're excited when you ask because it tells them that you're an educated buyer and that you're really serious about your business. And then other things too. They'll want to know you, you'll want to know, what is the price? And as you're looking at that, you know, one thing that we've talked about a lot too is, okay, do I look at the wholesale price and then I just double it and that's what I'm going to charge my customer?

No, you're going to look at that.

Product and you're going to say, how much could I sell this for? What is this worth? What does this look like? And some products, you're going to have a higher markup than others, but that's that discovery that you're going to be doing when you're at the show. All right, what other questions did I miss? I'm looking in the comments now, things to ask. I see people saying, research the businesses. What else?

Ashley, Samantha, I had, I saw one question, I saw one question. Somebody was talking about the pricing for profit and they said, what do we do when we source from vendors that then run discounts on their sites and that undercuts us?

Yeah.

And so I, I, I, I know this is a large issue. And one thing, you know, if that happens continually and they are pricing you, their discounts, are pricing you out of opportunity, it's okay to break up with vendors. It's okay to separate from them. However, I would ask you to do one thing first. Be vocal and tell them why. Don't ghost them. Don't stop texting or calling. Don't just like, ignore them. Get on the phone, send them an email and say, hey, I've been a trusted customer of yours. We have done this and this amount of business with you. But I, I'm ending this relationship right now because of this. If you don't say that and step up, you're not speak, you're not speaking for the industry and you're not making a move to improve them. Don't stop texting or calling. Don't just like, ignore them. Get on the phone, send them an improve it. So not saying that's going to make it go away, but our voice collectively, all of you guys on here, we have a very loud voice. And so I would just say, you know, hey, this is the reason why. That way they know it wasn't because a lot bad product or wasn't because of whatever it is. If that's the situation and you've decided that they're undercutting you, you can't afford to do it anymore, then it's okay. To break up with them, but please tell them why.

Yeah, and that's just like with your store. If you had a customer that came in and their experience wasn't 100%, you would want that feedback so you can make that change. I did see people say make sure that you ask when they're running a show special or a discount. That's a great question to ask. That's a very common thing for a lot of vendors to do. Our members of the boutique hub. Actually you guys all get a list. It's called our must see list. It lists all the brands that are exhibiting at these shows. And a lot of our vendors, because they value the partnership that they have with you in the boutique hub, offer a discount. And so that discount can be something like a reduced price on shipping, a percentage off. And that happens not only at market, but it also happens in our wholesale platform hub inventory. So just really great offer for you guys there. You want to make sure you take advantage of as a boutique hub member. So I'm looking at some other things too on here terms. Definitely that's a question to ask if you're looking for terms. All of these things are building a relationship and that's really how inventory investment should be viewed. It's not transactional, it's relational. And so how are you building that relationship with the brand? And asking questions is the best way to learn about each other. They should be asking you questions too. They'll want to know about your store. And when you start discovering different things about each other, then you can decide if it is a fit. I saw a question too about making appointments. A lot of showrooms are going to request that you make an appointment not as a gatekeeping, but as a. They want to provide great customer service. So if they know you're coming, they can make sure you've got a sales rep has dedicated time to show you the lines that you're interested in. Sometimes some of the attempts will also take appointments as well. And so same thing, it helps them with staffing. Just like in your boutique when you want to know how many people are going to be working on a Saturday, if you're expecting more people to come in, it's going to be a busy day, you're going to have more representatives there to help. So similar with that. And I do see something on here too about returns. That is a great question. I would ask the vendor if I have a problem with this product when it arrives, if it's damaged, if it comes so late, let's say I ordered Shorts, and they show up in June, and now I've missed my whole window to sell them. What am I going to do with that product? And like I said, any vendor that wants to build that relationship with you is going to be very open, honest, and answer those questions and you can take it or leave it kind of thing. You know, you decide if that's a good fit for your boutique as well.

Yeah. A couple more things I want to jump in and add here. Samantha, thinking about market.

Yeah.

Curious, you guys. You know, in the chat, I see we've got all kinds of different markets represented this January. I was lucky enough to be at Dallas Gift, and I often am at Dallas Apparel. I just have to say this. How many of you shop both gift and apparel markets? I know we've got different types of stores here, but I think it's worth mentioning there's a very strong crossover happening between apparel and gift, more than we've ever seen in the past. I think something that really was a catalyst for that was after Covid, when live selling became such a huge thing. There's a lot of apparel stores now going to gift showrooms and shopping at gift market. There's a lot of gift stores that call themselves gift stores. And maybe you don't call yourself a boutique, but the boutique world would call you a boutique. So we see gift stores coming to apparel markets and buying. It's not just apparel at apparel markets. There's all kinds of things. So don't put yourself in a box and call yourself I'm just one, I'm just the other. There's really a lot of great brands that maybe don't show at both brands or. I'm sorry, at both types of shows. So take that opportunity to learn about both. And, Samantha, something else you mentioned that I think is really, really important to note those showrooms. Right. And we ask, do I have to have an appointment? If you don't have an appointment, walk in anyway. Don't be intimidated. I hear that from boutiques a lot. Like, I'm a little bit intimidated. You kind of feel like you're in junior high walking into the room by yourself. You know? Anyone ever been there? Don't be intimidated. There's some amazing showroom owners that would love to welcome you in with open arms and show you around again. If you're gift and you're new to apparel or if you're in apparel and you're new to gifts gift, don't hesitate to walk in and say hi and introduce yourself. And if you're wondering about when some of those shows are. I know. Our team is in the chat and we have a whole list for you guys. It's just a free download, free PDF, and it's all of the 2024 apparel market and gift market dates. So every market in the country is on this list. So you can look at your calendar. There's major markets, but there's also regional markets that are listed. But we can drop you that link in the chat, too, if that's something that you're interested in.

Yeah. And those showrooms, they want your business. So that's what I'm saying. Don't ever feel like, oh, I can't go in there. It would be the same thing with your store. You would want someone to come in and say, hey, I'm interested in buying. They will work you into the schedule. 100 for sure. And if you ever need recommendations, that's what our team is here for. Maya Mitchell, I see you in the. In the chat, Phoebe. We are at the shows. We are making connections with those vendors and we want to help you find that best fit for you for that relationship.

Yeah. And just again, I think there's a lot of unique things, Samantha, wouldn't you agree? Like, you. You see sometimes a lot of the same things across a lot of places. But I think in showrooms, sometimes you'll find the more unique things.

So there's a. For sure. Yes. Yeah. And it really does start. I mean, I really do think about, like, that that starts up there and then it, you know, it comes down and so something that maybe they're like, well, I haven't seen that before. It's going to start at the top of the building. When I say the top, those showrooms are going to have it first, and then as it comes down and then ends up, you know, eventually, like we said in the trend section, the temps as it keeps going. All right, so let's talk about the next one, huh?

Oh, let's talk about the next one. So, all right, you go to market. We asked you guys what markets you guys go to. What wholesale platforms are you buying on. Drop me those in the chat. And as you're dropping those. I see Shannon mentioned this in the chat. I should mention it to you guys. So you all hear this, but I just didn't mention at the beginning. Our team's doing a big giveaway today. Did you guys see that? Anybody who's here, I have a. I believe I have a MacBook to give away today. Is that right? I have a MacBook. Somebody who's here? Who is tagging the boutique Hub on Instagram and Hubventory on Instagram. Somebody who's here today is going to win that. So, I mean, might as well, right? Free computer. That's kind of cool. All right, so let's talk about it. I see lots of fashion go fair, Hubventory, new order, Jore, what else? Yeah, so many good ones. And direct with the vendors websites. I'm seeing all of that. LA showroom. I mean, might as well, right? Free computer. That's kind of cool. All right, so let's talk about it. I see lots of fashion go fair, Hubventory, new order, Jordan, what else? Yeah, so many good ones. And direct with the vendors websites. I'm seeing all of that. LA showroom. Awesome. All right, so let's talk about a couple of them. Fashion goes 1 in the apparel industry that's been around for a really long time. Probably the most well known in terms of apparel. Those of you who are home and gift, maybe you don't know about Fashion Go yet. Great for fast fashion. There's a really great selection. You're going to know many of these brands from setting up at market. Many of them in the temp booth at market. Awesome. All right, so let's talk about a couple of them. Fashion goes 1 in the apparel industry that's been around for a really long time. Probably the most well known in terms of apparel. Those of you who are home and gift, maybe you don't know about Fashion Go yet. Great for fast fashion. There's a really great selection. You're going to know many of these brands from setting up at market. Many of them in the temp booths at Market. Cons. Maybe not as much home and gift as maybe say Fair or some of the other sites. So pros and cons, but definitely a great platform to check out for cons. Maybe not as much home and gift as maybe sir. Many of you guys know Fair. Great for home and gifts, smaller lines, easy to use. Many people say they shop fair for Terms. I hear that a lot. Some of you use Fair Insider for free shipping. Their new Shopify collaboration has been great. A couple of the cons on fair can be expensive for brands. It's a lot of commission on fair unless they have directly uploaded you as a customer. And then one thing I did want to mention, terms are great, but I'm gonna like this is my mom hat going on and just telling you to be a little bit careful with terms because we've seen some folks this year specifically when maybe Orders started to slow down, business started to slow down a little bit, get upside down with terms and the repayment of terms. So just as I would caution you to be very careful with Shopify Capital and PayPal Capital, I would encourage you to maybe try to get a line of credit at your bank. Something that's got a little bit safer payback. Just don't get yourself caught upside down. All right? And then Hub and Tory. Hub and Tory is brand new to the scene for both home and gift and for apparel. This has been a labor of love of mine since COVID We started to build this. Actually, all of our developers, our development team for hubventory is here. So dev team, if you guys want to like raise your hand in the chat and say hi. They actually listen to every single customer service request we get. They have meetings with stores that are buying on Hubventory to ask how can we continue to improve the platform. So it's fun to have them on. Join us today on this meeting. But Hub and Tory is built by the industry, for the industry. It's great for vetted, curated and trusted lines. We vet every single brand that comes onto Hub and Tory. It's both apparel, it's home and gift, it's children's. It's a little bit of everything that we see really working in the boutique and home and gift space right now. It's cost effective for brands, so very low cost, very low commission. They have an option. Brands have an option to sell for free on this platform to their customers or it's a low, flat 5%, which most other platforms are much higher than that. And anyone can shop on hubventory. But for those of you I know there's lots of Hub members who are here. Those of you who are Hub members, kind of like Fair Insider with the free shipping. There's actually specials for Hub members built into Hubventory. So this week is Customer Appreciation Week. We've got a number of brands that are doing free shipping or they do 5 or 10% off every single day and you don't have to pay membership that that comes free just for you being a Hub member and buying inventory. Also, this is another cool thing. I, I think it's cool because it's the only privately owned and family owned wholesale platform in the country. It's not owned by big corporation, it's not venture capital backed. It is a family owned small business and it comes with education built in. I know Samantha's going to tour Hub and Tori and some tools here in just a second. But Something I think that's really important is that you aren't just being pushed to buy a product, that you're actually building a budget, that you're using an ROI calculator, that you're getting a good return on the things that you're bringing into your business and reselling. So want to make sure that your business comes first and you're not just buying something for the sake of buying something. So, Samantha, you want to chat about some of these features?

Yes. Yeah, for sure. And I'll show you here that I would love to pop over to the site. I did see someone said, how do we shop on Hubventory? Literally, go to hubventory.com and sign up as a buyer, as a boutique, and you'll be asked a few quick questions. They'll want to know, Obviously, it's just like with a wholesale market, we'll make sure that you're a vetted retailer, so you'll have to upload a license. If you're a boutique member, we can help you with that. Get that done already. It's an easy integration. If you're not a member yet, you're still welcome to shop with us. We're happy to have you on the site. And then you're going to go through a really quick style quiz, so we can make sure that we're showing you the products you want to see that match that customer profile. So in the very beginning of this conversation when you were saying, you know, my customer is this age, my customer prefers, you know, more coverage or more modesty, or she's young and she wants to dress young, then you can go ahead and fill all that out in the quiz. And so you're making sure you're seeing those products. But one thing that we've really done that I think is so great is most boutiques that we've discovered have that creative side of their brain, right? So you guys are. You love to curate products, you want to put together collections and that kind of thing. And so we have boards. And so for those of you that were Pinterest fans, I'm like, raise your hands. I know you're out there. I love Pinterest. And you love to drag and drop products and put them together. That's what Hubventory has for you with our boards. So when you're thinking of, you know, what is my Mardi Gras collection feel like? What's my Easter collection going to look like? You can create a board and pull products from multiple different brands, different categories, and put them all together. On one board so you can see everything all together and imagine how it's going to merchandise in your store. So that's super exciting. And then the other thing that I have to brag about is our Shopify integration. So once you order those products, they become a draft in your Shopify store and then you can set those to active. Of course, once that product ships to you, and then you already have the photos, the descriptions, everything you need, pricing, it all is going to upload over into your Shopify. And so for those of you that are in the E Comm world or maybe you're just, you know, getting into it and you're like, this is a lot to get my inventory on my Shopify. Buy your products on Hubventory. They will come over through Shopify. The integration's done, saving you time, which, you know, really essentially is money too. So those are awesome there, Samantha.

One more thing I want to mention on that note. I know it's here from Faves. How many of you guys use Faves, the app when you're buying either at market or you're buying on a platform like this? If you have an open to buy plan and you're trying to sync all of your purchase orders and your inventory to one place, Hubentory also syncs with Faves. So anything that you buy on this platform will also sync to your app. So you can keep track of everything there in one place.

Yes. And then this I did see a question about someone asking more about open to buy. This is Sarah Burks's brain right here.

Her experience.

Sarah, I'm gonna call you out. Your experience as a boutique owner and years and years of doing the math and doing the numbers. Like I said, most boutique owners, maybe you were the more creative. I'm not going to generalize and say you don't like numbers, but I don't know if it's everybody's favorite part part. So we decided to basically build you a tool that can help you if that does not come to you naturally, which I am one of those people. So you can look at, if I buy this shirt, I buy this dress. If I buy this pack, what am I going to end up to be able to make out of it? And like Sarah said, when are you putting it on sale? How much are you discounting it at.

The end of the day?

How much money is that going to leave in your pocket? So this tool is right there on Hubventory. It's amazing when Ashley talked about those different categories of your pants, your dresses, your budget you can put all that in, and then you can track that. So let's say you set your tops budget and then you go shopping on Hubventory and you can start to see when that whittles away and you're like, okay, I've hit the amount of money that I want to invest in tops, I'm done there. I need to move on to the next category. So that's all built in on Hubventory. And this is what makes it so different from other places that you can shop other platforms is because, like I said, we want to give you the skills to be a better buyer. And so Hubventory has all these tools built in. It's free to use. You do not have to pay anything. Just come shop with us. We just want to help you and get inventory. You guys need something else on there, too. I didn't say, is the delivery calendar going back to that, like, fear of what if I order shorts and they show up, you know, in the middle of summer and it's too late for me. On Hubventory, when you put those products into your cart, place your order, you'll see the delivery date, and you can set the date that you want that to cancel. So if something happens with the vendor and they don't get that product out to you on time, and you have that set up where it will cancel. So I know a lot of you source products from multiple vendors. And the idea of trying to track the delivery dates and stay on top of those and make sure, oh, did that come in on time? Do I need to cancel it? What happened? Hubventory takes that guesswork out for you.

Samantha, can I just add something there?

Yeah.

Something I think is I love. I love this and this screen, you know, some of you guys that might be on your phones, maybe you can't see it quite, but that roi, the mark, the ROI calculator that's there, the budgeting plan, the delivery calendar, all the Shopify integration, all of these things were built because, you know, we always say this was built by boutique owners, by retailers for you. Because we listened to the problems, we listen. Just like we're asking you guys to listen to your customers and how, how to solve their problems. We're listening to you guys and say, all right, what are the hang ups? What are the things that, you know, really stress you guys out as, as buyers? This kind of stuff is it, Right? This isn't necessarily the fun stuff. So we wanted to build in some tools, and that's what we're big fans of faves too. And the some tools that can help you become more educated buyer, that mitigates the risk.

Right.

So therefore your profits are higher. Your, your, your time, you win back your time. You're not in the back room punching these, you know, trying to build these things out on pen and paper. We are able to build in a lot of automations for you. And I just want to say that delivery calendar man, you guys, that's a game changer because it's so important. And for all of you guys that did did snag one of our boutique boss planners, we have the content creator built into that. And the idea is that you track your deliveries and you set a calendar reminder to say hey, this products, these are. We have 80 units being delivered on Wednesday. I need to have those ready for my live and my big event, my Galentine's event on whatever day that's going to be. So building out that calendar, the dropping of your marketing plan, all those things that helps you be the most organized retailer possible. Which instead of just doing stuff under the gun and forgetting about things and thinking, oh, I'm pretty sure I did a fit video of that. I'm pretty sure I shared that on all the social channels only to find out if you the day after Valentine's and you've got all these Valentine's things that didn't sell and you go back and look and think, did anybody actually put these on Instagram? Did we ever do that? This delivery calendar helps you with that. So not only can it be in your brain the, the, the CEO of your business, but you can, you can delegate responsibilities out to the rest of your team, whoever that might be. Some of you guys are one man shows. But nonetheless you can still map out your time based on that delivery calendar and those, those expectations to get those products out in front of your customer in a timely manner so you can hurry up, turn that investment back into cash and go invest in something else the next thing.

Yeah, so true. So a couple questions coming from the chat. Sarah, I'm going to jump in or statements and you win back your time.

You're not in the back room punching these numbers and you know, trying to build these things out on pen and paper. We are able to build in a lot of automations for you. And I just want to say that delivery calendar man, you guys, that's a game changer because it's so important. And for all of you guys that did did snag one of our boutique boss planners, we have Brianna just asked.

How do I get the ROI calculator. This is Samantha. If you want to share your screen, maybe we're gonna show you this on Hubventory because that's where it is. It's built in on inventory. And then Heather and a couple other gals were asking about integrating all of their orders from Jor and New Order. So that's not a Hubventory thing. Hub and Toy is a platform just like your New Order. Fair fashion go. But Faves that we were talking about, Faves app, that's where you could come to integrate your orders from multiple different platforms into one. So check out that Faves app. I know. Oola, you can drop the. The link or I think Ben dropped the link in the chat. All right, I'm gonna escape out of that. There you go.

There we go. Okay, so this is. Have Ventory, like I said, we're super excited to share this with you. Something that we have going on this week is our customer appreciation week. So this means you're going to find a lot of brands that are offering you guys free shipping. And I know that's one of the big pain points right now, and we talked about that earlier, is that shipping is. Is hard. And you've got to calculate that into what you're charging for the product and when you sell it. So you're going to find that. So when you come onto Hubventory, there's multiple ways to shop. So across the top, these are my favorite places to start. One would be brands. So when you click on brands, this is going to show you all the brands that are shopping on Hubventory that are selling. And so when we click through here, through the power of the Internet. There we go. You'll find right here, the brand tells you where they're based, if they have minimums, and then you can see a selection of some of their products. And then what I really like is this social interaction part, right? Like we talked about building the relationship, it's not just transactional. So if you click follow right here.

Then the content creator built into that. And the idea is that you track your deliveries and you set a calendar reminder to say, hey, this products, these are. We have 80 units being delivered on Wednesday. I need to have those ready for my live and my big event, my Galentine's event, on whatever day that's going to be so building out this brand.

You'Re going to be following. So when I go to my customized feed, that I'm going to see more products from that brand. So if they add anything new, if there's anything that they're highlighting I will be find out first which is awesome. Other ways to shop on Hubventory besides just by the brand name which I said like you can scroll down and see but if you're looking for certain things, so there's things one you just want to see the brand you're following. This is what Ashley and Sarah were talking about with open stock. So if you don't want to buy in pre pack, you can choose to shop by open stock. If you're looking for plus size brands are doing live sales. Our top brands, those are brands that whose products are consistently bought and reordered because of quality and then great customer service. Those hub ever discounts for all of our boutique hub members, free shipping and then zip code protection. I did see some of you guys were chatting about zip code protection and showrooms that offer that if that's of interest to you, you can also filter that way categories. We've got something for everybody. And then down to values, aesthetics and then you can even sort by delivery dates when things are coming new to have inventory and then look at all the brands A to Z. So that's a great way to shop. Like I said, once you fill out that quiz and start following brands then you're going to get a customized feed here. So I'm going to click this out here and then we'll go to my feed and we'll be able to see brands that we are following. So that's just a really great way to see all those products that you're looking for. And then another thing that our team has done is they've made collections. So this also is going to save you time.

Like Sarah said, that calendar, the dropping of your marketing plan, all those things that helps you be the most organized retailer possible. Which instead of just doing stuff under the gun and forgetting about things and thinking, oh, I'm pretty sure I did a fit video of that. I'm pretty sure I shared that on all the social channels only to find out it's the day after Valentine's and you've got all these Valentine's things that didn't sell.

You know if you were looking to get those products, you need to find inventory. You want to source it in a way that's time efficient. You can do that by shopping our collections. So these are products that our team has put together in a collection that would work in your store. So you could look at some spring summer footwear for example and see all the products that are coming out for spring Summer footwear. I did see a question. What is the black dot? So the black dot is the hub member discount. So for those of you that are members of the boutique hub, a lot of our brands do value that relationship. And so they're going to offer you a discount of some kind, and that's automatically applied. So once you add that product to your cart, you don't have to worry about using a discount code or a coupon or anything like that. You're going to get that discount right away. All right. Other things that we've got on here would be our boards. And so I know I talked to you guys about those a little bit ago about that Pinterest factor. So this star up here is going to take me to my boards, and I love this. So right now, we know spring is. Is here. Well, maybe not for some of you yet, but spring is coming, and so you need that spring inventory. And so we put together these boards that have those trends that you're looking for.

And you go back and look and think, did anybody actually put these on Instagram? Did we ever do that? This delivery calendar helps you with that. So not only can it be in your brain, the.

The.

The CEO of your business, but you can. You can delegate responsibilities out to the rest of your team, whoever that might be. Some of you guys are one man shows, but nonetheless, you.

So this is super important. You guys probably saw peach fuzz was the color of the year. If you want to bring that education and that opportunity to your customer to have this really pretty color of peach in there in your store, this is a great way to shop that. And so like I said, the board, if you want to, you can follow it. And so as more products are added, you'll be able to see that. And then from this board, you can create your own board. So if you're like, I like some of these, but there's a different way that I want to source peach for my store. I need to include maybe more footwear. I need to pull in some kids. You'll be able to create a board that way as well. All right, Ashley, what else do we want to look at this? We want to go over to find more about our Customer Service appreciation or Customer Service Customer Appreciation Week.

Yeah.

Samantha, why don't you tell everyone, those of you who are viewing about Customer Appreciation Week, and then I'm going to jump in and talk about the trend report when you're ready.

Yes.

You guys would love to see the trend report too.

Yes. Yeah. So Customer Appreciation Week, we're offering that this week. So this is that that call to action shop this week is the 29th of February 2nd. Everybody that places an order this week will be entered into a giveaway to win up to a thousand dollars. So that's a good way if you haven't made your first purchase on Hubentory yet or you're one of our amazing hundreds of thousands of repeat buyers, then this week when you purchase you're going to be entered into win. So customer appreciation week. What we've done here with you guys is we put together and I'll come back to that, we put together the top selling things that you need in your store for spring. I know a lot of people you know say I don't know what it is I should be buying right now. What are those transitional pieces? You know, I need some direction. Hubventory can help provide you with that direction.

So whether you're can still map out your time based on that delivery calendar and those those expectations to get those products out in front of your customer in a timely manner so you can hurry up, turn that investment back into cash and go invest in something else. The next thing.

Yeah, so true. So a couple questions coming from the chat. Sarah, I'm going to jump in or statements looking for immediate ship products.

You want to know what are the best selling styles. We brought all that together for you in an easy to shop spot. And then something that we always pair with our our events on Hub and Tory is education. So that's what really makes Hub and for different is that like I said it's not transactional, it's relationship based and then it's got the education you need. So Ashley, tell us about the springtime report.

Yeah if you'll click on that Samantha. So you guys, I just dropped that link in the chat for you so you all can snag this. I think we'll send it out in the email with the replay as well. But that that trend report comes in like a full flip book and I forget how many pages it is. Maya, you'll have to tell me in the chat but it's a ton. And it's fashion trends, it's home and gift trends, it's children's trends, it's shoe trends, it's jewelry trends, it's all the things beyond just you know, peach fuzz and the color of the year. And then not only did we take the trend report that you guys can use, but Brianna just asked how do I get the ROI calculator? This is Samantha. If you want to share your screen. Maybe we're going to show you this on Hubventory because that's where it is. It's built in on Hubentory. And then Heather and a couple other gals were asking about integrating all of their orders from Jor and New Order. So that's not a Hubventory thing. Hub and Tory is a platform. Just a couple other things that you're going to find with the trend report on this page. Our. Our team buil several boards highlighting some of those trends. Like, personally, I love the bow trend. I love the bow trend. And we're seeing it in jewelry, we're seeing it in shoes, we're seeing it in apparel, we're seeing it in home and gift. So we made boards on all these trends so you can really quickly find things that fit that aesthetic. Something that I've seen a lot of stores do in their own Facebook group or in their Instagram stories is just screenshot and take some of these trends and go back with be the buyers to your own community or ask your community about the trends that they love or the trends that they don't love. We all know in different regions of the country, different things are going to trend at different times. I'm telling you, I grew up in North Dakota. I feel like I grew up always five years behind the trend. Now, social media has obviously changed that. We're a little more trend forward, but every region of the country is different. So use this as a conversation starter and engagement piece for your community. Your customers are going to love to get in on this. I bet. If you just ask the question, are you ready for low rise jeans to come back? Do I just say customers? Your customers would absolutely die. Right? Nobody wants Low Rise jeans to come back.

Yeah.

And that's that. Like this or that. And I. Yeah, I guarantee you the engagement on that is going to be huge. You know what else I thought too that I think would be a good one is the capris. I felt like after we got a capris, people were like, never again. And guess what? They're here. Yeah, I love that trend report.

Like your new order, fair fashion go. But Faves that we were talking about, Faves app. That's where you could come to integrate your orders from multiple different platforms into one. So check out that Faves app. I know Oola, you can drop the. The link or I think Ben dropped the link in the chat. All right, I'm gonna escape out of that. There you go.

There we go. Okay, so this. All right.

Any other questions on that you guys drop them in the chat. And Samantha, I will go back to the screen. I'm gonna go back to my slides. I know you want to talk about managing.

Yeah, there was a couple questions. Ms. Samantha, there was a couple questions you'd mentioned about sourcing products that are vendors that offer drop shipping. Do you want to talk through that just a little bit? There was some questions in the chat specifically about what drop shipping was and just how to find that.

Yeah. So drop shipping is going to allow you to bring products to your customer and not actually have them in your store. So there's different partners that Boutique Hub works with that do offer drop shipping as well as brands that will do this. So basically what you're going to do is it allows you to maybe on your Shopify or on your E Comm list the product. When the customer orders the product, it goes direct from the manufacturer to the customer. So it's never coming and touching your hands. It's going straight to them. So there are brands on Hubventory and in the Boutique Hub that do offer drop shipping. You can't drop ship directly from Hubventory at this time, but there is that opportunity to do that. And our team is happy to help you connect with them as well. You know, there's a. I'd say pluses and minuses to drop shipping, but it is a business model that for some people is have inventory. Like we said, we're super excited to share this with you. Something that we have going on this week is our customer appreciation week. So this means you're going to find a lot of brands that are offering you guys free shipping. And I know that's one of the big pain points right now. And it's really made a difference. And other people said, you know, it's not for me. So it just kind of depends on what your goals are for your store and what your customer prefers.

There was also a couple questions about live selling. We had some people ask what exactly does live selling meaning?

Yes. Yeah. So live selling is same. Is that same thing. It's similar to. It's getting your customer excited about a product before you actually make the purchase. So if you are. We talked about earlier is that shipping is. Is hard. And you've got to calculate that into what you're charging for the product. And when you sell on Hubventory, there is that option to sort by live selling brands. And so they can do this in a couple different ways. One is they would send you a CSV file and then a sampling of products which would be in a live box. A live box is kind of like a best of the best or a curated collection of products that you could go live with to your own audience. So you would take those products, you would set up a live, let your audience know you're going live, you're showing them the products, telling them about it, and then as they are liking it, and yes, I want this product, I want this product. Either using comments sold or shopify, they can indicate to you they want to order it. And then you go back to the vendor and you say, okay, based on this, I basically sell it. So you're going to find that. So when you come on to Haventory, there's multiple ways to shop. So across the top, these are my favorite places to start. One would be brands. So when you click on brands, this is going to show you all the brands that are shopping on Hub and Tory that are pre sold. This many of these shirts and this many of these, you know, headbands and shoes and whatever it is. And then you place the order with the vendor and then the vendor ships the product. So life selling, you know, it's one of those things too. I think it really took off during COVID and it's not going away. Some people are really passionate about it. It's done great things for their business. Other people, maybe you're like, I'm not really comfortable getting in front of the camera and doing that. It's. It's one of those things of, you know, don't knock it till you try it. And maybe there's a way that it works for you. I've seen some people that like to do it where it's recorded. So it takes away that pressure of a live sale or to do it with somebody else. So, you know, get somebody else in your shop to come go live with you. And it kind of takes that pressure off of you selling. And so when we click through here, through the power of the Internet, there we go. You'll find that Hubventory does support that search for finding brands that really like right here, the brand, it tells you where they're based, if they have minimums. And then you can see a selection of some of their products. And then what I really like is this social interaction part, right. Like we talked about building a relationship, it's not just transactional. So if you click follow right here, then this brand you're going to be following. So when I go to my customized feed, that I'm going to see more products from that brand. So if they Add anything new. If there's anything that they're highlighting I will be find out first which is awesome. Other ways to shop on Hubventory besides just by the brand name which I said like you can scroll down and see but if you're looking for certain things so there's things one you just want to see the brand you're following. This is what Ashley and Sarah were talking about with open stock. So if you don't want to buy in pre pack, you can choose to shop by open stock. If you're looking for plus size brands are doing live sales. Our top brands, those are brands that whose products are consistently bought and reordered because of quality and then great customer service. Those hub member disc to work with people that are going live and it just like we said, it's another way of doing business and it's another opportunity for you to make some money.

All right, good. All right, Samantha, we've got something kind of cool that just actually is launching today on Hubventory. So good timing, good to tell you guys about it. But this is also something that's been in the works for a little while and that's we finally today are able to tell you guys that we're launching rewards on inventory which is so exciting. Those of you who have placed any orders, again we're just over a year old but we've gone back retroactively and assigned points, redeemable points, redeemable cash for.

For those accounts for all of our boutique members, free shipping and then zip code protection. I did see some of you guys were chatting about zip code protection and showrooms that offer that if that's of interest to you, you can also filter that way categories. We've got something for everybody and then down to values, esthetics and then you can even sort by delivery.

You've been already buying on Hubventory. So you're going to see that and hear a ton more about it as we go forward in the coming weeks on Hubventory. Samantha, anything you want to add to that?

Yeah, can I want to share my screen one more time really quick because I want to show everybody where they're going to be able to find this because it's super, super exciting that we have this opportunity for you guys to do this. So when you are logged in dates when things are coming new to have Ventory and then look at all the brands A to Z. So that's a great way to shop. Like I said, once you fill out that quiz and start following brands then you're Going to get a customized feed here. So I'm going to click this out here and then we'll go to my feed and we'll be able to see brands that we are following. So that's just a really great into Hubventory. And you go under your account, so your little face right here is your. And then you come down and you see, oh, 31 reward points. And you click on this. This will tell you about the hubventory reward way to see all those products that you're looking for. And then another thing that our team club, how you can earn points on every purchase that you can use towards future has done is they've made collections. So this also is going to save you time. Like Sarah said, you know, if you were looking to get those products, you need to find inventory. You want to source it in a way that's time efficient. You can do that by shopping our collections. So these are products that our team has put together in a collection that would work in your store. So you could look at spring summer footwear, for example, and see all the products that are coming out for spring summer footwear. I did see a question. What is the black dot? So the black dot is the hub member discount. So for those of you that are members of the boutique hub, a lot of our brands do value that relationship. And so they're going to offer you a discount of some kind of. And that's automatically applied. So once you add that product to your cart, you don't have to worry about using a discount code or a coupon or anything like that. You're going to get that discount right away. All right. Other things that we've got on here would be our boards. And so I know I talked to you guys about those a little bit ago about that Pinterest factor. So this star up here is going to take me to my boards. And I love this. So right now we know spring is, is here. Well, maybe not for some of you yet, but spring is coming and so you need that spring inventory. And so we put together these boards that have those trends that you're looking for. So this is super important. You guys probably saw peach fuzz was the color of the year. If you want to bring that education and that opportunity to your customer to have this really pretty color of peach in their, in your store, this is a great way to shop that. And so like I said, the board, if you want to, you can follow it. And so as more products are added, you'll be able to see that. And then from this board, you can create your own board. So if you're like, I like some of these, but there's a different way that I want to source peach for my store. I need to include maybe more footwear. I need to pull in some kids. You'll be able to create a board that way as well. All right, Ashley, what else do we want to look at this. We want to go over to find more about our Customer service appreciation or Customer Service Customer Appreciation Week.

Yeah.

Samantha, why don't you tell everyone, those of you who are viewing about Customer Appreciation Week, and then I'm going to jump in and talk about the trend report when you're ready. Yes. You guys would love to see the trend report too.

Yes. Yeah. So Customer Appreciation Week, we're offering that this week. So this is that, that call to action shop this week. It's the 29th of February 2nd. Everybody that places an order this week will be entered into a giveaway to win up to a thousand dollars. So that's a good way. If you haven't made your first purchase on Aventory yet or you're one of our amazing hundreds of thousands of repeat buyers, then this week when you purchase, you're going to be entered into win. So Customer Appreciation Week, what we've done here with you guys is we put together, I'll come back to that. We put together the top selling things that you need in your store for spring. I know a lot of people, you know, say, I don't know what it is I should be buying right now. What are those transitional pieces? You know, I need some direction. Hubventory can help provide you with that direction. So whether you're looking for immediate ship product looks, you want to know what are the best selling styles. We brought all that together for you in an easy to shop spot. And then something that we always pair with our, our events on Hubventory is education. So that's what's really makes Hub and worry different is that like I said, it's not transactional, it's relationship based and then it's got the education you need. So Ashley, tell us about the Springtime report.

Yeah, if you'll click on that, Samantha. So because I just dropped that link in the chat for you so you all can snag this, I think we'll send it out in the email with the replay as well. But that, that trend report comes in like a full flip book and I forget how many pages it is. Maya, you'll have to tell me in the chat, but it's A ton. And it's fashion trends, it's home and gift trends, it's children's trends, it's shoe trends, it's jewelry trends. It's all the things beyond just, you know, peach fuzz and the color of the year. And then not only did we take the trend report that you guys can use, but a couple other things that you're going to find with the trend report on this page.

Our.

Our team built several boards highlighting some of those trends. Like, personally, I love the bow trend. I love the bow trend. And we're seeing it in jewelry, we're seeing it in shoes, we're seeing it in apparel, we're seeing it in home and gift. So we made boards on all these trends so you can really quickly find things that fit that aesthetic. Something that I've seen a lot of stores do in their own Facebook group or in their Instagram stories is just screenshot and take some of these trends and go back with be the buyers to your own community or ask your community about the trends that they love or the trends that they don't love. We all know in different regions of the country, different things are going to trend at different times. I'm telling you, I grew up in North Dakota. I feel like I grew up always five years behind the trend. Now, social media has obviously changed that. We're a little more trend forward, but every region of the country is different. So use this as a conversation starter and engagement piece for your community. Your customers are going to love to get in on this, I bet. If you just ask the question, are you ready for Low Rise Jeans to come back? Do I just say customers? Your customers would absolutely die. Right? Nobody wants Low Rise Jeans to come back.

Yeah.

And that's that. Like this or that. And I. Yeah, I guarantee you the engagement on that is going to be huge. You know what else I thought too, that I think would be a good one is the capris. I felt like after we got a capris, people are like, never again. And guess what? They're here. You know, I love that trend report.

All right, any other questions on that? You guys drop them in the chat. And Samantha, I will go back to the screen. I'm gonna go back to my slides. And Sarah, I know you want to talk about managing.

Yeah, there was a couple questions. Samantha, there was a couple questions you'd mentioned about sourcing products that are vendors that offer drop shipping. Do you want to talk through that just a little bit? There was some questions in the chat specifically about what drop shipping was and just how to find that.

Yeah. So drop shipping is going to allow you to bring products to your customer and not actually have them in your store. So there's different partners that Boutique Hub works with that do offer drop shipping as well as brands that will do this. So basically what you're going to do is it allows you to maybe on your shopify or on your E Comm list the product. When the customer orders the product, it goes direct from the manufacturer to the customer. So it's never coming and touching your hands. It's going straight to them. So there are brands on Hubventory and in the Boutique Hub that do offer drop shipping. You can't drop ship directly from Hubventory at this time, but there is that opportunity to do that and our team is happy to help you connect with them as well. You know, there's a, I'd say pluses and minuses to drop shipping, but it is a business model that for some people has really made a difference and other people said, you know, it's not for me. So it just kind of depends on what your goals are for your store and what your customer prefers.

There was also a couple questions about live selling. We had some people ask what exactly.

Does live selling your purchases on Hubventory. And the great thing is, like we said, it launched today. Your points will be good for a whole year, so you've got all that time to use them. And then it's just a really great way to save money. You know, you're already going to be buying this product anyway. And then the fact that you can earn on it and then apply that towards even more purchases to bring inventory in your store, it's just awesome. And questions about that. We've got them all listed out here. What happens with my points when they're available? How do I redeem them? All those things? But like I said, you can find this by just going to your profile on Hubventory and then you come down and you click on your rewards points and they'll show them right there.

Awesome.

That's great.

Good deal. All right, let's talk about some business trends. Oh, we talked about trend trends. You guys all got the trend report. I dropped the link. Several of us dropped the link in the chat for you. I know someone just asked in the chat about sourcing show. I think we've got a download, like a little PDF on how to attend a sourcing show as well. We could drop that for you in the chat too. Let's talk about a few other business trends. Besides the fashion trends and home and gift trends, how many of you guys are into sustainability at this point? If I think about products that are often searched on Hubventory or conversations I'm seeing happening a lot in our industry, the movement toward eco friendly and sustainability, that's just a huge conversation that's not going anywhere. I feel like maybe fashion industry specifically has been a little bit behind the eight ball in this conversation compared to a lot of other industries. So this is something as you're going to markets and as you're buying online, just really keep us top of mind. This is not going anywhere. It's only going to become more in demand. Samantha, would you agree?

Yes, for sure. And this is how you differentiate yourselves from Amazon, Temu machine, those kind of things. Your customer wants something special, they want to know what they're buying is going to last. And so that sustainability trend we keep seeing over and over again, people asking what are the products that it's made from, what are the materials, what's the fabric content, where was it created and what's the impact that it's going to have on the environment?

Yeah, huge piece drop shipping we did. We already talked about this a little bit. I know there are some brands that have started to experiment using Hubventory for drop shipping. So we're not telling you that's necessarily coming in the future, but there are some people working on that, just testing it out. But there's so many other great partners that we have that do drop shipping in the hub. Again, that's a really great way for inventory filler. I would say being solely drop shipping, you're gonna kind of blend into the crowd. Not a sustainable way to run your business, but it definitely is good for some fillers and opportunities. The boards we talked about already and just the power of launching with connection or collections in your business and live cell boxes. We hit on. We're ahead of schedule. Look at us go. Sarah, let's talk about this. So we talked about planning your buy, planning a budget, inventory classifications. We talk about going to market, we talk about shopping online. Now what do you do after you've bought the stuff so you can keep track of it all?

Yeah, I, this, you know, I, I know we want to leave time for Q A at the end. So I, but I do, I would, I do not feel like we would do you guys justice if we said, all right, all that is, is go buy and have fun and sell it. And it's, that's it. There is so much more to being that better Investor and buyer in your inventory after the purchase.

Right.

So the reason why this is important guys is again, we want to turn that product back into cash as fast as we can. But with that we want there to be data, we want there that inventory to tell us a story. So enter the whole idea of purchase order maintenance. So what that means is when you, when you check out with a product on Hubventory or at Magic or wherever you're going to get your purchase order, that's everything that you have ordered when it's coming in, the ship date, the cancel date, the vendor, the date, the colors, the skew, the all the things, right. So it's very important that you take that information and you utilize it. Now if you're using Faves, which we dropped the Faves Pro app link, and if you have information straight from Hub and Toy that's going into your Shopify, you're going to be able to capture a lot of this, which is a big time saver. If you're not, you're just getting started, it's extremely important that you are, you're taking note and tracking all of these things, organizing the information off that purchase order into your point of sale system. And this means your vendor the cost.

Yes. Yeah. So live selling is same is not same thing. It's similar to, it's getting your customer excited about a product before you actually make the purchase. So if you are on Hubventory there is that option to sort by live selling brands. And so they can do this in a couple different ways. One is they would send you a.

CSV file, retail price, price, the ship date, the cancel date. The cancel date's super important because this is your window like you said, like you're, you have a set say, say in when the product should be in your store and if it is approaching that cancel date. I highly recommend when you utilize this information, you get on the phone, you call where's the tracking number, where and.

Then a sampling of products which would be in a live box. A live box is kind of like the best of the best or a curated collection of products that you could go live with to your own audience. So you would take those products, you would set up a live, let your audience know you're going live, you're showing them the products, telling them about it and then as they are liking it.

And yes, I want this product, this shipment. If it's not going to make it by the cancel date, you have a.

Decision to make, right?

Do you like I want this product? Either you're using comments sold or shopify, they can indicate to you keep it.

Do you extend it, do you ask for a discount, or do you cancel it? Color is super important. The reason why the color is important is later when I come into your store and I buy certain things, and when.

When you check me out, they want to order it. And then you go back to the vendor and you say, okay, based on this, I basically pre sold this many of these shirts and this many of these, you know, headbands and shoes and whatever it is. And then you place the order with the vendor, and then the vendor ships the product. So light.

If you put the color in your system along with the product that you're.

Selling, you know, it's one of those things too. I think it really took off during COVID and it's not going away. Some people are really passionate about it. It's done great things for their business. Other people, maybe you're like, I'm not really comfortable getting in front of the camera and doing that. It's. It's one of those things of, you know, don't knock.

It starts to build a story behind my purchases as well. It also helps you understand what colors sell, what colors don't sell, all of those type of things in your store. Again, the data is super, super important. The style number, that's crazy important because what happens when you try it?

And maybe there's a way that it works for you. I've seen some people that like to do it where it's recorded, so it takes away that pressure of a live sale or to do it with somebody else. So, you know, get somebody else in your shop to come go live with you. And it kind of takes that pressure off of you. You. But Hubventory does support that search for finding brands that really, like, sell through.

This rainbow dress that's pictured here within a week.

And you to work with people that are going live. And it just, like we said, it's another way of doing business, and it's another opportunity for you to make some money.

Go back and you say, oh, my gosh, I have a wait list of people that want this. What do you do? Call that vendor and say, hey, I'm pretty sure I bought a rainbow dress from you at Magic. And they're going to say, so did 20,000 other people. Can you give me the style number? Can you tell me?

Perfect. Good. All right, Samantha, we've got something kind of cool that just actually is launching today on Hubventory. So good timing. Good to tell you guys about it but this is also something that's been in the works for a little while and that's we find more information.

So you want to make sure you know, you know, are tracking that information.

Today are able to tell you guys that we're launching rewards on Hubventory, which is so exciting information.

The description that's extremely important, especially when you know, say you are pushing it onto your, your e commerce site or you're, you know, you again have a customer that is suggesting or requesting something that description, having that in your point of sale system.

Help those of you who have placed any orders. Again, we're just over a year old, but we've gone back retroactively and assigned points, redeemable points, redeemable cash for, for those of you who've been already buying on Hubventory. So you're going to see that and hear a ton more about it as we go forward.

Tell that story and then also the order date, all of that starts to build a story behind that specific purchase and what was on that purchase order, how much that purchase order was when you committed to it, all of those things. So it's way more than just ripping the box off, the tape off the box, writing on a piece of paper.

On in the coming weeks on Hubventory. Samantha, anything you want to add to that?

Yeah, can I, I want to share my screen one more time really quick because I want to show everybody where they're going to be able to find this because it's super, super exciting that we have this opportunity for you guys to do this. So when you are logged into Hubventory and you go under your account, so your little face right here is your person and then you tag how much.

It'S gonna, the retail price is gonna be and selling it. If you do that, yes.

Come down, you see, oh, 31 reward points and you click on this, this will tell you about the inventory rewards.

You might get the cash for it right then. But think of all the education and the resources and the knowledge about that.

Club, how you can earn points on every purchase that you can use towards.

Future product and the, the journey that product had in your store that you've lost. So this is extremely important.

Yeah.

So then after that, if you want to go to the next slide, your purchases on Hubventory.

And the great thing is like we said, it launched today, your points will be good for a whole year. So you've got all that time to use them. And then it's just then because of.

That information that you've just Captured there.

You'Re able to start really great way to save money. You know, you're already going to be buying this product anyway and then the fact that you can earn on it and then apply that towards even more purchases to bring inventory in your store, it's just awesome. And questions about that. We've got them all listed out here. What happens with my points when they're available? How do I redeem them all those things? But like I said, you can start.

Building out more stories again with this inventory classification, right? Of those accessories, what's working, what's not, what colors, when, when do they sell highest in your year? How old were they? When they sold, what? You know, all of those things.

Find this by just going to your profile on Hubventory and then you come down and you click on your rewards points and they'll show them right there.

Awesome.

That's great.

Good deal. All right, let's talk about some business trends. Oh, we talked about trend trends, you guys.

Casual dresses, dressy dresses, denim, all those inventory classes. They have to have a story.

But we have all got the trend report. I dropped the link. Several of us dropped the link in the chat for you have to start.

Building those off of the information off those purchase orders. I I put a few examples of our create collections ideas aftermarket. When you get these products, you should start putting them into collections on your.

I know someone just asked in the chat about sourcing show. I think we've got a download like a little PDF on how to attend a sourcing show as well. We could drop that for you in the chat too. Let's talk about a few other business trends besides the fashion trends and home and gift trends. How many of you guys are into sustainability at this point? If I think about products that are.

Often site collections in your store floors, we somebody said that they like to source products by color and that's fine. But we still are thinking, okay, what is that collection, right? Is it just the pink collection? Do we give it a name? Are we driving traffic to that? Are we creating a marketing plan around hey heartbreaker or date night or floral fever or the whole going green searched.

On Hub and Tori or conversations I'm seeing happening a lot in our industry. The movement toward eco friendly and sustainability. That's just a huge conversation that's not going anywhere. I feel like maybe fashion industry specifically has been a little bit behind the eight ball in this conversation compared to a lot of other industries. So this is something as you're going to markets and as you're Buying online.

All of those things, things you can pick and pull from the inventory classes that feed into those collections. Just like those boards and things that we just showed you on Hubventory that you were are interested in buying from. I saw a lot of love for the boards and those collections on Hubventory because it makes it easy for you. It takes a lot of the guessing out. You are discovering new.

Just really keep this top of mind. This is not going anywhere. It's only going to become more in demand. Samantha, would you agree?

Yes, for sure. And this is how you differentiate yourselves from Amazon, Timu machine, those kind of things. Your customer wants something special, they want to know what they're buying is going to last. And so that sustainability trend we keep seeing over and over things.

Well, when you can put different products into the Floral Fever collection, again, people.

Asking what are the products that it's made from, what are the materials, what's the fabric content?

When I shop your store, I'm going to discover things that I might not have known I wanted or what not a known even existed. But because you put it in an overall collection that has a vibe and a theme to it that relates to me, that obviously increases the chance.

Where was it created and what's the impact that it's going to have on the environment.

Yeah, huge piece drop shipping.

We did.

We already talked about this a little bit. I know there are some brands that have started to experiment using Hubventory for drop shipping.

So we're not going to buy more from you. So that's something to be done after.

Market and then not telling you that's necessarily coming in the future. But there are some people working on that, just testing it out. But there's so many other great partners that we have that do drop shipping in the hub.

Again, number five, create that content plan, that delivery plan, right. So you can, you can get a plan in place of when you're going to go live, all the photos that you need to have, videos that you need to have created the copy that you want to have done. So when those products do, it's a.

Really great way for inventory filler. I would say being solely drop shipping, you're gonna kind of blend into the crowd. Not a sustainable way to run your business, but it definitely is good for some fillers and opportunities. The boards we talked about already and just the power of launching with you.

Ship to your store. When they ship to your store, you.

Can put them to use right away.

Connect or collections in your business and live cell boxes, you can get them.

Out on the store floor out on your website and create, create an experience for your consumer with no downtime at all because from the time that they.

Swipe your we hit on we're ahead of schedule. Look at us go Sarah, let's talk about this. So we talked about planning your buy, planning a budget, inventory classifications, credit card.

Or they capture your payment or your whatever it is is the clock is.

About going to market. We talk about shopping online now what do you do after you've bought the stuff so you can keep track of it all?

Yeah, I, this, you know I, I know we want to leave time for Q A again that inventory is aging and it does not get better with age and we want to turn that back at the end. So I, but I do, I would, I do not feel like we would do you guys justice if we send the cash as fast as we can. So having this number five done right. All right. All that is is go buy and have fun and sell it and it's. That's it. There's aftermarket while you're waiting for your products to come into your warehouse or onto your store floor. That saves, that saves you time, helps you get organized and helps turn that back into cash as fast as possible. And I talked about it with the Boutique boss Planner. That is the some of that content creating opportunity where we married the content creator and the Boutique Boss Planner together. It was strictly for this in mind to help us win back our time and stay more organized.

So good. Lots of things.

So much more to being that better investor and buyer in your inventory after the purchase.

Right.

So the reason why this is important guys is again we want to turn that product back into cash as fast as we can. But with that we want there to be data. We want there that inventory to tell us about a story. So enter the whole idea of purchase order maintenance. So what that means is when you, when you check out with a product on Hub and Tori or at Magic or wherever you're going to get your purchase order, that's everything that you have ordered when it's coming in, the ship date, the cancel date, the vendor, the date.

A couple questions that came up in the chat. Those of you who I mean there's some of you here that are new, there's some of you here who are advanced. I saw someone just ask, ask this question if you're someone who's been the.

Colors, the skew, the all the things, right. So it's very important that you take.

Around for a while and you're like okay Sarah, this is awesome. I want to take it like 10 levels even deeper. Like I really want to talk about open Dubai on a whole nother level. Does the boutique Hub offer training for that?

Sarah, take that information and you utilize it. Now if you're using Faves, which we dropped the Faves Pro app link and if you have information straight from Hub and toy that's going into your shop Shopify, you're going to be able to capture a lot of this which is a big. Yeah absolutely. And I've been I see everybody in the chat dropping ideas and the time saver if you're not you're just getting started. It's extremely important that you are things too. And I there's a number of you that have taken the boutique owner basics class, the retail owners basics class and I saw you saying highly recommend if you're just getting started that is a great place to to go through in a course where we talk about your take taking note and tracking all of these things organizing the information off that purchase order into your point of sale system. And this means your vendor the cost, the retail price, the ship date, the cancel date. The cancel date super important because this is your window like you said like you're. You have a set say say in about these different things for a higher level on this retail bootcamp for sure that is our higher level course. We will we launch that on that just recently in January and we'll launch it again when the product should be in your store and if it is approaching that cancel date I highly recommend June. But even inside our membership is a great place to get resources on this and we have a detailed training library that builds out these things and helps helps answer commend when you utilize this information you get on the phone, you call where's the tracking number? Where's this shipment if it's not going to make it by the cancel date you have a decision to make, right? Do you keep it? Do you extend it? Do you ask for a discount or do you cancel it? These questions as well as just our our live chats and our every week we have two live educational sessions inside our boutique membership community that answer questions you don't even know you have yet.

Right.

So great resources there as well. Color is super important. The reason why the color is important is later when I come into your store and I buy certain things and when when you check me out. But yes, open to buy plan. Oh man it is. It's. It's a monster and it the if you put the color in your system along with the product that starts to build a story behind my purchases as well. It also helps you understand what takes some time to build out. And we also partner with services like ULA with fake colors Sell what colors don't sell all of those type of things in your store. Again, the data is and management one that that's what they do. That's the space they live in. They're extremely talented and that is super, super important. The style number, that's crazy important because what happens when you sell through this rainbow dress that's pictured here within a week and you at and they they understand the ebbs and flows of your retail industry that can really help you get that that set up specifically for you. If you want to, you know, delegate that out to someone else, go back and you say oh my gosh, I have a wait list of people that want this. What do you do? Call that vendor and say hey, I'm pretty sure I bought a rainbow dress from you at Magic. And they're going to say as well.

Awesome.

All right guys, we're going to be ready to do some questions.

So did 20,000 other people. Can you give me the style number? Can you tell me more information? So you want to make sure you know, you know are tracking that information answers.

So if you have questions on anything today, either drop it in the chat or if you have the little information.

The description that's extremely important especially when.

You know say is your hand feature. You can put that up and all of us are happy to answer any of your questions but just again couple action items for today. I'll show you. Obviously this week is customer appreciation.

You are pushing it onto your, your E commerce site or you're, you know, you again have a customer that is suggesting or requesting something that description. Having that in your point of sale system helps tell that story. And then also the order date, all.

Of that starts to build on hubventory. We've talked about the, the giveaway that we're doing this week to be entered.

The story behind that specific purchase and what was on that purchase order.

How much you win A thousand dollars. Also the rewards program we just launched on Hub and Tory, some of you also just asked about membership at the Hub. Sarah, you talked about that. A little bit more information on becoming a Hub member. Obviously we have a beautiful amazing markets team. You'll get to meet them in Dallas.

That purchase order was when you committed to it all of those things. So it's way more than just ripping the box off the the tape off the box, writing on a piece of paper, on a tag how much it's gonna, the retail price is gonna be and selling it. If you do that, yes, you might get the cash for it right then. But think of all the education and the resources and the knowledge about that.

Process in Atlanta, in Vegas, we're always out and about. You'll get to meet Samantha Connor. But hopefully a couple other things you guys walk away with today. A copy of the Trend report, hopefully a copy of all of the markets list all over, you know, all over the country, where's the market's at and then how to get more of those hub member savings for those of you who are hub members. And yes, we are gonna product and.

The, the journey that product had in your store that you've lost. So this is extremely important. So then after that, if you want to go to the next slide, then because of that information that you've just captured there, you're able to start building out more stories again with this inventory classification.

Right, we're going to send out the recording. You all will get the recording as well. All right, let's do question and answer. How many of you guys have questions today? Again, raise your hand with a little like raise your hand feature or you can drop it in the chat and we'll go through and answer some of your questions.

Of those accessories, what's working, what's not, what colors, when do, when do they sell highest in your year? How old were they, when they sold, what? You know, all of those things. Casual dresses, dressy dresses, denim, all those inventory classes. They have to have a story. But we have to start building those off of, of the information off those purchase orders. I picked up a question maybe half.

An hour ago from Louisa.

How do you, I, I put a few examples of our create collections ideas.

After market plan when you don't have data because you don't have enough sales yet.

Market. When you get these products, you should start putting them into collections on your. There you go. That is a really good question. And so with that, what we want to do is we want to basically start off with your personal budget, right? We want to look and say site collections in your store floors. We, somebody said that they like to source products by color and that's fine. But we still are thinking, okay, what is that collection, right? Is it just the pain? Okay, what are, what are our goals? What do we want to be bringing in? What does it make collection? Do we give it a name? Are we driving traffic to that? Are we creating A marketing plan around hey Heartbreaker or Date Night or Floral Fever or the whole going green expectation for our business. But also where financially are we all of those things you can pick and pull from the inventory classes that feed into those collections, just like those boards and things that we just showed you on Hubventory that you were can. What can we invest in to turn around and then build off of? So each person is going to be a little bit different. You very well may say, look, I have a thousand dollars are interested in buying from. I saw a lot of love for the boards and those collections on Hubventory because it makes it easy for you. It takes a lot of the guessing out. You are discovering new. You may say, I have $200 and you take that 200 and you turn it into 250 and then you turn things. Well, when you can put different products into the Floral Fever collection, when I shop your store, I'm going to discover things that I might not have known I didn't. 450. And then we take about 50% of that, 46% of that and reinvest that back into more inventory. Over time you've built a business, right? You're able then to take that and you're to build that wanted or what not a known even existed. But because you put it in an overall collection that has a vibe and a theme to it that relates to me, that obviously increases the chance I'm going to buy more from you. So that's something to be done aftermarket. And then number five, create that content plan, that delivery plan, right? So you can you kill the equity in your business, build the products into your business, all of those things you can start out very, very small. So with that those sales, what's selling and what doesn't, what sells fast and what doesn't that starts to tell that story. But I would, I personally like to start and say, okay, you know what, what ideally is your goal? What would you like to see or get a plan in place of when you're going to go live, all the photos that you need to have, videos that you need to have created the copy that you want to have done. So when those products do ship to your store, when they ship to your store, you can put them to use right away. You can get them out on the store floor, out on your website and create, create an experience for your store, be able to bring in. But then also, what can I afford to put into my store right now? Now? And some people will say, well, I need to have this big, wide assortment plan right away. No, I've seen businesses really build their business off of very few products and they just really go very focused zoomer with no downtime at all. Because from the time that they swipe your credit card or they capture your payment or your whatever it is, the clock is ticking. That inventory is aging and it does not get better with age. And we want to turn that back into cash and as fast as we can. So having this number five done right aftermarket while you're waiting for your products to come into your warehouse or onto your store floor, that saves, that saves you time, helps you get organized, and helps turn that back into cash as fast as possible. And I talked about it with the Boutique boss planner. That is the some of that content creating opportunity where we married the content creator and the boutique boss planner together. It was fun. Strictly for this in mind to help us win back our time and stay more organized.

So good. Lots of things, A couple questions that came up in the chat. Those of you who, I mean, there's some of you here that are new, there's some of you here who are advanced. I saw someone just asked this question.

If you're someone who's been on those few products, amp up the education, highlight the value, show the versatility of things. You see it on Tick Tock all the time.

Right.

So I, you can totally start small.

Very good. And Anna, I see your, your comment about even going deeper, even on open to buy on man vendor ROI on profit first on all the stats and reports again, that's definitely a boot camp thing as well. All right, let's do some unmuting. How about Allie Cohen, you're the, you're the top of the list. You want to unmute and ask your question around for a while and you're like, okay, Sarah, this is awesome. I want to take it like 10 levels even deeper. Like, I really want to talk about open Dubai on a whole nother level. Does the boutique hub offer training for that? Sarah?

Yeah, absolutely. And I've been, I see everybody in the chat dropping ideas and things too, and I. There's a number of you that have taken the boutique owner basics class back.

Ally, are you there? Still muted.

All right, can you guys hear me?

There you go. Yep.

Hello?

Okay.

Okay.

Class.

The retail owners basics class. And I saw you saying highly recommend if you're just getting started. That is a great place to, to, to go through in a course where we talk about these different things for a higher level on this retail boot camp, for sure. That is our higher level course. We will. We launched that just recently in January and we'll launch it again.

So we are in our third year.

We're very, very new.

We are learning as we're going and we are coming to summit in June. But I can't wait till June for this. So here's my big question. We totally messed up on our first buy and we bought in June.

But even inside our membership is a great place to get resources on this and we have a detailed training library that builds out these things and helps help answer these questions as well as just our, our live chats and our. Every week we have two live educational sessions inside our boutique hub membership community.

That answer a gazillion of each size. And now here we are three years later.

Questions you don't even know you have yet.

Right.

So great resources there as well.

And we still have a ton obviously of this inventory because we thought we were just going to be rock stars and we needed four for online and four for Facebook and four for this and four for our storefront. And yeah, yeah, didn't work that.

But yes, the open divide plan, oh man, it is, it's. It's a monster and it takes some time to build out. And we also partner with services like ula, with faves and management one that, that's what they do. That's the space they live in. They're extremely talented in that and they, they understand the ebbs and flows of your retail industry that can really help you.

Wait, so. And it's kids like tween stuff. That's how we started.

So I get that set up specifically for you if you want to, you know, delegate that out to someone else.

I need help. I don't even know where to begin to get rid of someone else as well.

Awesome.

All right, guys, we're going to be ready to do some questions and answers. So if you have questions on anything today, either drop it in the chat or if you have the little range of it.

We've literally marked it down to what we've bought it for and we definitely have liquidated.

Is your hand feature. You can put that up and all of us are happy to answer any of your questions. But just again, couple action items for today. I'll show you. Obviously this week is customer appreciation. We didn't.

We took it to all of our holiday shows and those types of things. Clearly we are not buying like that anymore. We have learned from our mistakes. But do you have any sources, resources or ideas?

I have a couple things. Are Are you currently a boutique Hub member?

Yeah. Speak on hubventory. We've talked about the, the giveaway that we're doing this week to be entered to win a thousand dollars. Also the rewards program we just launched on hubventory. Some of you also just asked about membership at the Hub. Sarah, you talked about that. A little bit more information on becoming a Hub member. Obviously, we have a beautiful, amazing markets team. You'll get to meet them in Dallas, in Atlanta, in Vegas. We're always, you'll get to meet Samantha Connor. But hopefully a couple other things you guys walk away with today. A copy of the Trend report, hopefully a copy of all of the markets list all over, you know, all over the country. Where's the markets at? And then how to get more of those Hub member savings for those of you who are Hub members. And yes, we are going to, we're going to send out the recording. You all will get the recording as well. All right, let's do question and answer. How many of you guys have questions today? Again, raise your hand with a little like raise your hand feature or you can drop it in the chat and we'll go through and answer some of your questions.

I picked off a question maybe half.

An hour ago from Louisa.

How do you plan when you don't.

Have data because you don't have enough sales yet?

Oh, there you go. That is a really good question. And so with that, what we want to do is we want to basically start off with your personal budget, right? We want to look and say, okay, what are, what are our goals? What do we want to be bringing in? What does. It may be our expectation for our business, but also where financially are we can, what can we invest in to turn around and then build off of? So each person is going to be a little bit different. You very well may say, look, I have a thousand dollars. You may say, I have $200. And you take that 200 and you turn it into 250, and then you turn it into 450, and then we take about 50% of that, 46% of that and reinvest that back into more inventory. Over time, you've built a business, right? You're able then to take that and you're to build that, build the equity in your business, build the products into your business. All of those things, you can start out very, very small. So with that, those sales, what's selling and what doesn't, what sells fast and what doesn't, that starts to tell that story. But I would, I Personally like to start and say, okay, you know what. What ideally is your goal? What would you like to see your store be able to bring in? But then also, what can I afford to put into my store right now? And some people will say, well, I need to have this big, wide assortment plan right away. No, I've seen businesses really build their business off of very few products, and they just really go very focused on those few products. Amp up the education, highlight the value, show the versatility of things. You see it on TikTok all the time, right? So I. You can totally start small.

Very good. And Anna, I see your. Your comment about even going deeper, even on open to buy on man, vendor roi on profit first on all the stats and reports. Again, that's definitely a boot camp thing as well. All right, let's do some unmuting. How about. Ally Cohen, you're the. You're the top of the list. You want to unmute and ask your question. Ally, are you there? Still muted.

All right, can you guys hear me?

There you go.

Yep.

Hello?

Okay.

Okay. So we are in our third year.

We're very, very new.

We are learning as we're going, and we are coming to summit in June, but I can't wait till June for this. So here's my big question. We totally messed up on our first buy, and we bought a gazillion of each size. And now here we are three years later, and we still have a ton, obviously, of this inventory because we thought we were just going to be rock stars. And we needed four for online and four for Facebook and four for this and four for our storefront. And, yeah, didn't work that way, so. And it's kids, like, tween stuff. That's how we started. So I. I need help. I don't even know where to begin to get rid of some of it. We've literally marked it down to what we've bought it for, and we definitely have liquidated and we took it to all of our holiday shows and those types of things. Clearly, we are not buying like that anymore. We have learned from our mistakes. But do you have any sources, resources, or ideas?

I have a couple things. Are. Are you currently a boutique hub member?

Yes.

Okay, then jump into the inventory exchange group because Amber in the chat on Facebook is saying, I need tweens post in the D stash group. Have you tried that yet?

No, I have no idea what that even is.

Okay, cool. Well, not cool that you don't know what that is.

That.

That. I. I apologize about that. But this is, this will be a great opportunity for you. All of you as Boutique Hub members, you have access to, to our inventory exchange group that's part of your membership. This is a place that you can go in and post inventory that is not selling for you, but very well might be amazing for somebody, another Boutique Hub member. So you sell it at your wholesale cost. You have the opportunity to go in there, make a post, drop the drop photos and, and destash your inventory there. So that's number one. I would highly recommend doing that. Amber Colvin, I see you in the chat. Hopefully Alice will go ahead and be able to get some of that in there for you. The other thing is, I would just say we don't sell what we're not excited about. So I highly encourage you guys to stay uber, uber excited about your products. You are the only one that knows how old they are. You're the only one that knows how long they've been there. When you're in excitement falls, your consumer excitement will also fall and that'll be evident in the, in the sales. So if those things still have life, if they're still good products, look at how you've marketed them and say, what else could we do? We do this all the time at the Hub, say, all right, what else could we have done? What else? How else could we have presented this information or this product? You know, I. You have, do you have tween models? Have you got those on different models? Have you, have you done lifestyle photos with the tween models? Have you done the fit videos with the tween models? Have you showed the versatility of these, these products? If you've answered yes to absolutely every one of these things and you just cannot do anything, then, you know, then maybe we talk about like even donating. But my thing is just posting and forgetting about it doesn't work anymore. Video, video, video, show these things in action. So important.

The issue is they're amazing products and we've sold them a ton. The issue is that we, because we're so new, we still only have the same customers. So they're seeing the exact same. Even though we have separated them. Like if they're outfits, we've separated them and tried to put them with different things and regroup them somehow, but it's not even that they're not selling. They're definitely selling on, but we have so many.

Okay, then jump into the inventory exchange group because Amber, in the chat on Facebook. I see, sure. So then, yeah, I, I would definitely start with the D stash group. I would start there. And is that on Facebook or is that on. I will grab one of. One of the poll. I see you want to grab that and just drop that in the chat. The link for that. Thank you.

You.

Oh, got it. Megan. Thank you. Great place to start. Another perk to Bouti Cub membership.

Perfect. Thank you.

Thanks for your question.

I will just say the last thing learned from what you. You've already sounded like you. You have. Sounds like you guys have. Have learned from going super deep and getting a little bit, you know, ahead of yourself. And that's kind of what I was saying a second ago. You know, you guys start out small, test the water, see what's working.

The good news is, Ally, you're not alone. I would just be curious. You guys raised your hand if. Raise your hand if you've been in her boat and your first buy was maybe a bit of a train wreck. Anybody? Probably a lot of us, right? And that's the only way. You know, Sarah always says this. She's always like, Ashley, if you're not winning, you're learning, right? There's no losses, there's no failures. Like, this is a game of retail, man. Sometimes you're gonna buy things and it's just gonna turn out to be a complete dog, and that's it, you know. So congrats on being in the same boat as everyone else here.

Thank you. Thanks, everyone.

You bet. All right, you guys raise your hand if you have questions. I'll call on you. I'll call on you next. I see one in the chat. I think the store name is Return. I'm probably butchering it. I apologize. But Sarah, she's asking, how do you know what amount of inventory you should. Should have based on last year's sales or last year's sales per month? How do you find that number?

Okay, so one of the things I always like to say is based on your last year sales, what when you go back and you're looking to say, a lot of it depends on your pricing strategy. So if you are. If you're sourcing inventory and you're. Let's say we want to do $30,000 worth of inventory in sales in January, and that. That's at retail, right? That is, that is your. Your. That's your. Your plan. Well, how fast are you selling your inventory? What is your inventory turn? So with that, we know how. Where we're at, we have to have so many months worth of inventory on hand. So there's a whole equation. I can grab it for you guys here, it's a little bit more complicated than just verbally talking through it. But the idea is, if you turn your inventory three times, three times in a year, you would take 12 months divided by three, and that gives you four, right? Four. So you would want four months worth of inventory on hand now. So you're probably saying, okay, what? So that's it. So then you look and you say, at cost. So then we have to basically say, if you're doing $30,000, your goal is $30,000. What is that at cost? Inventory and have four times that amount on hand. So I know everybody. If I could see the explosion of brains happening right now, I, I, that's, that's gonna happen. So this is why. This is why open to buy planning and turn rate is is. It's a whole webinar. It's a whole course. It is definitely deeper than this is definitely deeper than just, I apologize. There's no other way to really answer that question. It's a pretty deep question. But it all goes back to your sell through how fast do you sell your inventory and how that, that tells you how fast to replenish it to reach your said sales goals. And keep in mind, you don't want to be the bread aisle in the store that all of a sudden the grocery aisle has two pieces or two loaves of bread in it. If you walk around the corner at a grocery store and you see a bread aisle which is two loaves of bread in it, what do you do? You get in your car and you go to a different store because you're thinking something's wrong with that bread might. Who knows what it is, right? You always want a replenishment of goods on hand because that makes the customer feel comfortable. If your inventory gets too low, they're going to say, oh, Susie's going out of business. Something's bad happening, and she's going to jump over to the coffee shop, start chatting with all the other hens and say, suzy, store's going down. I just know it is. And it might not be. You just might not be replenishing your goods fast enough. At the same time, when you have way too much stuff on hand and a customer is going to come in or come onto the site and be confused, odds are they're not buying because a confused mind typically does not make a purchase. So it is, it's. There's a science to it. There is definitely a science to it. And yeah, we go much deeper in that. All you retail boot campers that's coming up in layer two in. In three weeks, we're going to hammer that out. So lots, lots of things happening. The hens I see say, yeah, I'll drop, I'll drop the formula, Ellie, no matter what. Let me go. I'll put that in here. Give me a second to get it typed out for you. I'll drop it in there. In both the chat here and on Facebook.

Yeah. Some other good resources, you guys. So, yes, we do cover all that in retail boot camp. There's several trainings on that inside of membership too. So in your training library, look under. It's actually like training library layer number two as well for membership. Some great resources, you guys. Christine Gray does a wonderful job talking about some of these things in Profit First Management 1 is a really great resource. There's a lot of people out there willing to help, so don't be shy. If you're like, that is like gibberish to me. You're definitely not alone in that for sure. All right, Brianna, I see your hand up. Do you have a question? Maybe not great resource. There's a lot of people out there willing to help, so don't be shy. If you're like, that is like gibberish to me. You're. You're definitely not alone in that, for sure. All right, Brianna, I see your hand up. Do you have a question? Maybe not. All right, iPhone78, iPhone78, do you have a question? All right, iPhone78, iPhone78, do you have a question?

Hi, I do.

This is Sarah.

I own Faircloth Boutique in Detroit. And my question is kind of based on what Sarah just said. So your.

Your store can't look to.

Hi, I do.

This is Sarah.

I own Faircloth Boutique in Detroit. And my question is kind of based on what Sarah just said. So your store can't look too low on inventory. But if you don't have like significant.

Amount of income to buy new inventory.

Is it literally just playing the credit.

Card roulette and trying to pay it.

Off or get down to as low.

As you can every month at that low on inventory.

But if you don't have, like significant.

Amount of income to buy new inventory.

Is it literally just playing the credit.

Card roulette end of every month and.

Hoping that you can pay it off?

Like, what is that magic?

And trying to pay it off or.

Get down to as low as you can every month?

Yeah.

So first story. Yeah. So a lot of that is going to come back to your pricing strategy. You know, building a pricing strategy that is that is going to absorb, you know, your expenses. Hopefully you then from your pricing strategy, you're able to take that percentage end.

Of every month and hoping that you can pay it off.

Like what?