HV Anniversary Special! Why to Shop and What's New on Hubventory

Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works from mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat.

Hey guys. It's you and me this week and it is going to be a bit of a personal episode. It's something that is so near and dear to my heart that I want to take you behind the scenes on and celebrate with you. So I'm coming to you this week to celebrate our one year anniversary of together, you and I building Hub and Tory, in case you haven't followed it yet, Hubventory is our very own online wholesale marketplace built by the boutique Hub for our entire industry. The cool part about Hubventory is we've been asked about building a wholesale platform for years, like way pre pandemic and thought, okay, we'll eventually get there. We'll eventually get there. Well, over the pandemic we started to tinker and build and finally last year launched this grassroots platform. I can't even begin to tell you how many countless conversations I've had, how many zoom calls, how many feedback sessions that our entire team has spent time just hearing from you guys. What do you want in a wholesale platform? What do you love? What features are commonly missing? How can we help you as a retailer buy smarter, not just add everything to your cart and hope that it works out, but actually analyze the data of what's working in your business, find the products that exactly fit what's working in your business, manage your budget, manage your open buy and on top of it, save you time once you purchase the product and it syncs to your Shopify or whatever your ecommerce platform is. So tons of feedback on the boutique side of things in launching Hubventory, but also on the brand side of things. We heard from thousands of brands looking for another avenue to sell that wasn't just an online platform. That was also a platform that considered a brand's needs when they go to market or when they're selling in their Facebook groups or just to help a brand be more successful altogether. And so with all of that feedback combined, we put our heads together and our team took over a year and a half to slowly and intricately build our own platform. Enter hubventory.com so in the last year. I wanted to share with you guys today a couple of the highlights and behind the scenes on the platform, what we recently released and where the platform is going next. All right, so let me take you back to some of our highlights in the last year. In the last year alone on Hubventory, one of the things I am absolutely the most proud of is the fact that Hub and Tory is the only privately owned small business online wholesale platform in the world. And every other platform has all kinds of VC money and millions of dollars invested to blow these platforms up. And. And it's working, right? Fair's awesome. Fashion goes awesome. Some of you use bulletin, new order, all kinds of platforms. Well, we wanted to build Hubventory to be different, something that is a niche platform built by our industry, for our industry, totally grassroots. So with your help along the way, we've slowly built this platform that has organically done really well. We have hundreds of thousands of products uploaded on Hub and Tory. Over 900 brands that are hand selected just for you guys that we know do really well in boutiques. We don't want all kinds of distributors and secondhand junk and the people that are also selling on Sheen to drop their subpar merchandise on Hubventory. We wanted it to be niche and selected carefully for you as a boutique owner because one of our biggest values is strong trust. We want you to know that we are looking out for your best interest and that's what you're going to find on the platform. So that has really led to a lot of conversations with you this year about what makes Hub and Tory different. A couple of other things that I know make Hub and Tory different are number two, just a sense of community. Trust and community go hand in hand. We, we often say at the Hub, our team says, you know, we aren't an online wholesale marketplace, but we have one. Hubventory is just one part of our overall mission at the Hub. To support retailers and manufacturers really from the inside out, from helping you find expert business education so that you can grow your business, learn the latest strategies, but also to help you connect to a community who gets it, who you can trust. And I feel like on Hub and Tory, it's got to be the same way for both retailers and brands. Right? We have the ROI calculator built into the platform and your overall budget tracker so you can input, okay, I have this much to spend overall and that breaks down by tops, bottoms, home and gift. Right. Add ons however you want to slice and dice your categories so you can track Your budgets, but also the creative inventory planning boards on Hubventory that make it so different. The vision there was just to help Hubventory be like a Pinterest meets a wholesale platform experience. So that as you're planning your next launches, your next collections, your next season ahead in home and gift, you can pin things to your boards and lay out what's going to merchandise well together, what should launch together, what has similar shipping time frames so that you can see what your E commerce platform or your storefront is going to look like just by your boards before you actually buy everything. We wanted it to be smarter and work with your business based on your feedback in the community. So all of those internal business tools, from the ROIs and the budget to the planning boards, it really has to work for you and your business first and a brand's business first. Now the last piece that I really think makes Hubventory different. We talked about community, we talked about the education, we talked about these unique tools. But this to me is the biggest. And this is why I don't compare Hubventory to any other wholesale platform. Because we don't want to be that. We want to be different. It's because we're omnichannel now. What is good for the goose is good for the gander, in my opinion. So when you're a brand, it's not just about how many things can you sell in Hubventory. I want every single brand that works with us at the boutique Hub and Hubventory to find success, whether they're selling on our platform or not. I do think you should go to trade shows. So on Hubventory, we're going to promote every single trade show that you're attending. Our team is going to be at those big trade shows in Dallas and Atlanta and Las Vegas. We're going to give you signage, we're going to help you drive traffic. We're going to. We just want to see you successful and see boutiques find brands that they love no matter where they're at. And we also feel the same way about Facebook groups. Whether you're promoting and sharing inside of the boutique hubs Facebook groups and you guys are buying from brands inside of our Facebook groups or you're discovering brands on Hubventory or in the boutique hub and then joining that brand's Facebook group, that's another really great way for a brand to share their latest inventory in a way that's a little bit private for them so they aren't getting knocked off. Right. We all know what that's like and it's a great intimate relationship for a, a brand and a boutique inside of a Facebook group. So our mission is it's gotta be Omnichannel. When you buy on Haventory, we're encouraging you, yes, to buy and plan there, but also at market and also in Facebook groups and the same for the brands. We want to have an Omnichannel platform that is education based, helping you build from the inside out, but it is in a community central focus that gives you the trust and the reliance that you need every day to know that you're doing business efficiently. So that's a little bit behind the Hubventory. Why where we're going, why we want to do what we're doing and why Hubventory is different than any other platform. Now a couple of big changes. If you haven't been on Hubventory anytime in the last couple of months, it's our one year anniversary and I would say we got a heck of a glow up going on for the one year anniversary. A couple of awesome features that we recently released that, that I am so proud of. I'm going to give you my biggest baby first because this has been a long time coming. I have wanted this since day one of the platform and we finally launched it and that is our Shopify sync for retailers. So the second that you buy something on Hubventory you can choose in your settings. Do I want these products either at time of purchase or the time that they ship to auto create a draft product in Shopify at my desired markup or or if MSRP is available, also using those stock photos automatically from the brands that I've bought them from. So you can simply do this by downloading the Hubventory app in the Shopify App Store. It's so easy to use and my goal is that it saves you a full time employee. I've talked to boutiques that are spending like a full like 40 hours a week just managing all of the orders they've placed with vendors and getting the photos, getting the descriptions, making their markup and uploading them into Shopify. If we can cut out a huge chunk of that, man, you have time to work on more efficient things in your business. Income generating activities or you as a CEO have time to have a boundary, take a break, have a life. All the things that we want to do outside of business. So if you haven't tested this out yet, just simply download the app in the App Store and Shopify for Hubventory. Set your desired markup and try it buy something on inventory, see how it works and hopefully this saves you a ton of time. Now, I want to also mention this. If you use the Faves app, which I'm a huge fan of, the Faves app, you guys, where you're buying at market, you're putting it in with your open to buy and then syncing to Shopify Hub and also integrates with Faves. So that's another way to get things into Shopify is if you use the Faves app and you're buying on Hubventory and syncing those two together as well. We just want to help you buy smarter and save a ton of time. So this feature is a really, really big deal because nobody else, no other platform has done it like Hubventory has done it in this regard. A couple other features and things you should definitely look for when you shop on Hubventory. I mentioned those inventory planning boards, right? So the second that you sign up to shop on Hubventory, you automatically have a few sample boards waiting for you. Again, think about this as like your tool to help you, like on Pinterest, plan out your boards before you buy something. And it's for you to launch collections in your boutiques or to plan your next new arrival dates. So play around with the boards that are suggested for you and then also search on the boards page to find all the boards that our team at Hubventory has created for you. We've got these from dog mom ideas to stocking stuffer ideas for the holidays, to gifts for teachers and back to school to game day broken out by color, the game day orange, the game day purples, the game day blues, every way to slice and dice it. We have all kinds of inspiration boards for you to follow and then pin from or buy from from Hubventory. Now you also have the option as a user on Hub and Tory, whether you're a retailer or a brand, to turn your boards public so that other people can discover, follow and buy from your boards as well. It's kind of a cool community feature to see what other people are pinning and planning. So check out those boards. Definitely use that. Or if you're someone who's like, you know what, I don't need that added stuff. I just want to find what I'm looking for and add it to cart. Cool. You can totally do that as well. One other way to make discovery really quick and easy, a feature that I love on Hubventory is the following feature. So if you're following brands like TCEC and Mixology and Chinese laundry that you know that you love. There's also a section on your dashboard that says My Feed. So when you start following brands and you start making purchases, your feed will start to populate on Hubventory with brands we know you love, with the latest products that they just uploaded, and then with similar brands that we can suggest for you that might really fit your store style. So check out that my Feed option. Another option to help you really personalize your experience on Hubventory is the Style quiz. So if your store is a more coastal store or a more western store, or a more contemporary store, you can take the style quiz to put those settings on your profile. And again on my Feed, then we can start to suggest brands that would be a better fit for your store and help you quickly discover some cool things that you might not have found anywhere else. So those are big features that we are super excited about on Hubventory. Now, something else that we worked on this year and I'm excited to see more people discover that we have this feature is the related products feature. So let's just say that you're shopping and you're looking for a matching set, right? You found the top and you've added it to your cart, but then you have to go search the style number to find the matching bottoms. Pain in the butt takes a ton of time, right? So what we did was we added a related products feature so that brands, when they're uploading products, can simply click this is a related product. So that sets can go together and also so that extended sizes can go together regular. And plus you could find them suggested for you all in one place. This is also really good for the mommy and me options. So if you have a mommy product and a matching me product, those can be related and you can quickly discover those as well. So when you're searching for related products or full size runs, it makes it much easier to discover those things on Hubventory if the brand is using the related products feature. So be sure to put a bug in your brand's ears that you're shopping with. And we are doing the same to make sure they're utilizing that so that you, the retailer, can find things even faster. Now, the last thing I want to mention that's been an enhancement on Hubventory this last year has been our feature weeks. Our feature weeks are an opportunity for us to say, okay, boutiques, we know you're planning for the holidays, right? So we have a holiday feature week in early August to help you get a jumpstart and we have plus size weeks and children's weeks and home and gift weeks, all kinds of weeks. To help you really get ahead of what you're looking for during those weeks, we have exclusive products like Judy Blue offered some exclusives to us. TCEC mainstrip. Many brands have brought exclusives just to Hubventory for those feature weeks. Plus hundreds of our brands offer Hub member discounts, especially during feature weeks. So it's a really good time to shop with the brands that you already love, but save with those brands. Now. This brings me to one of my favorite overall and biggest features on Hub and Tory. Are you ready for it? Anybody can shop on Hub and Tory, any retailer. You don't have to be a member of the Hub to shop, I repeat, you do not have to be a member of the Hub to shop on Hubventory. But if you want your very own insider program, if you are a member of the Boutique Hub and there are specials just for you, there are hundreds of brands who offer 5% off, 10% off or free shipping exclusively to members of the Boutique Hub, which in one order typically pays for your annual membership at the Boutique Hub. Right. Like it's a total no brainer to be a member and to save 5, 10 or get free shipping on all of these orders you're placing on Hubventory. So automatically in your cart once you order, you can see how much money you saved just by doing business with some of your favorite brands. Who want to say, hey, thanks for taking your business seriously and being a member of the Boutique Hub. We hear this feedback all the time, you guys from brands. The reason that they love offering discounts to Boutique Hub members is they know that stores who are a member of the Boutique Hub are taking their business seriously. They're invested in education, they're looking for input from the community. They want to stay involved, they want to know what is happening next. So they're like, yeah, I want those customers to be my customers because I know they're serious and they're going to be here for the long run. And honestly, at the end of the day, for, for any type of vendor relationship to be successful, in my opinion, it has to be a win win, right? It has to be. The vendor is investing in to the retailer and the retailer is investing into the vendor and we're building a relationship and we're trying to build long term like buying power right with one another. So that's why I think that feature has worked so well. So if you are a member of the Hub and you're shopping on Hubventory, just look for that little hub sticker right in the center. Not the center, but right in the corner of the products on Hubventory and it'll slide over and say, hey, save 10%, save 5% or get free shipping. When you purchase with those brands, check out that feature and start to save right away. All right, at the end of the day, you guys, I just have to say a major thank you, thank you to all of the brands who took a chance on launching products on a brand new platform. We are the youngest of all the platforms out there, but we are the mightiest. I will tell you, you guys have Hubventory growing like a weed and there's so much excitement around having a niche, trusted, community based platform. So thank you guys. Boutiques, brands thank all of you for your input, your feedback, your constant feedback. Even now as you're shopping and you're saying, hey, I love this, but could you add that? Or you know what, what else would be great on Hubventory? It's this or you know what brand? I really love to shop, but it's not on Hubventory. It's that that type of feedback helps continue to fuel the grassroots nature of this platform that you guys have helped build. So thank you now for all that you've done and thank you in advance for the feedback that I know we will continue to send. We appreciate it and we cannot do this without you guys. All right? So if you haven't checked it out yet, Please head to hubventory.com Help us celebrate our one year anniversary. Download our trend report for fall and winter. Download the trend report for the holiday season. Follow some boards, follow some brands, plan your inventory or just shop and save as a Hub member when you do. You guys, thanks again. Thanks for being in this short podcast this week to help me celebrate. And last but certainly not least, major, major hats off and kudos to our entire team at the Boutique Hub. We have some amazing developers on staff who you guys don't see at our events or in our Facebook groups. They are all working behind the scenes to continue to build this platform platform for you and they have done an amazing job and they are so receptive to your guys's feedback and want to see your business be successful. So kudos to our dev team led by Ben Holman, our CTO here at the Boutique of Hubventory. Thank you to our entire team at the Hub for your constant work on this, your ideas, your inspiration and your motivation to keep Hubventory going. You guys it has been an amazing ride. Happy one year anniversary on Hubventory and thank you guys for helping make this platform possible. And let's see where we're going to go next. Thanks guys.

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

We'll see you next week.