Great Customer Service

Good customer service is a must in a boutique. One bad review can have a great impact on a small business. Customers look for customer service while they shop, especially if they are in a boutique. Concentrating on customer service should be one of your main objectives. Customers’ reviews will help you to grow your business, spread the word about your store, and lead to more. These tips can help you and your staff to consistently provide the excellent customer service that your clients crave.

Get to know your customers. Recognizing them when they come in and hopefully remembering their names can make them feel special, like they are a part of your boutique. Boutique shoppers are unique in the sense that they are there to feel special. It’s not very often that they shop in boutiques for necessities. So, ask yourself why they are there. What do they hope to gain from their shopping experience? Do they wish to feel pampered or closer to the local culture? Do they want to find unique apparel and accessories? Providing the right kind of products is only half the battle. Your image is everything.

The image that a boutique portrays will help to give the shoppers the feeling that they are after when they go there. The way that they are treated is equally as important. They want to feel special, respected, and needed. Personal greetings are remembered and can make the customer feel valued. Help your staff to realize that this is the goal of your store. They shouldn’t be hanging around the counter talking to each other if a customer comes in. They need to greet, help, be friendly, and try to go above and beyond the call of duty whenever possible. Your boutique’s success could depend on it.

Keep in touch with your customers if you can. Inform them by mail or e-mail of special promotions. If possible, include a personal note. Giving that extra effort can gain you life-long customers. They will surely brag to their friends about how much they love your store and how helpful everyone is.

One thing that customers say is unique about boutique customer service is that they can actually get good fashion advice. It should be much different than browsing a big department store where decisions are completely left up to the customer. Your staff should be able to ask enough questions to figure out the customer’s style and make suggestions to them. After they try the garments on, the staff should be able to tell them if they think they need a different size, color, or design. This personal touch is appreciated by most people and can encourage them to come back for more advice.

Presenting your merchandise in a way that is easy to explore is also important. Your staff shouldn’t have to help someone by digging through mountains of clothes. Use modern retail fixtures, like slatwall and slatwall accessories to evenly distribute your merchandise in an easy to navigate manner. Slatwall panels are great for using oddly shaped areas that would otherwise go unused. They help the customer to be able to leisurely browse and look around without feeling cramped or overwhelmed.

About the Author: Ron Maier is the Vice President of S & L Store Fixtures, a leading online resource for retail displays, including mannequins, dress mannequin forms, female mannequins, slatwall and slatwall panels. For more information, please visit http://www.slstoredisplays.com.

Boutique Store Design

In a boutique, image is everything. Boutiques offer customers a unique shopping experience that is rich in interesting displays, decorations, and style. The theme of a boutique can be what brings customers back again and again. Creating an interesting theme is important, but making your boutique accessible, shoppable, and easy to navigate can be just as important.

Have you ever seen a store that looked really interesting, but then you go in and everything is crowded and messy? It can be a big turn-off. Unless I’m shopping a garage sale, then I expect everything to be visible when I look at a display. I want to feel like my size will be there if I like what I see. I like to get an idea of what the clothes and accessories will look like if I put them on, without having to spend all day in the dressing room. I don’t want to feel like I’m squeezed in with other customers, hunting through piles of clothes all day.

Your boutique store design should take the customer’s shopping experience into consideration. You can utilize certain rules of retail display to help you make the greatest impact. You know, being a boutique owner, that impressions are your biggest weapons. You want your customer to feel what you’re trying to convey with your store the second they lay eyes on it. This is, after all, what has made boutiques such a huge success this century.

People want to feel like they are unique, interesting, and important. This drives them to shop the smaller stores, boutiques, or handmade goods outlets. Make sure that your displays are creative and stay true to your store’s theme. Make your customers feel like they are important and like their happiness is your first priority.

Create displays using mannequins or mannequin forms to show them what unique items would look like if they are worn. Mannequins give you a unique edge when conveying a certain message. They help you to create more interesting, personal, and effective displays than you could ever create without them.

Making room for all of this interesting stuff may seem like a problem at first, but really you may have more room than you think. Utilizing vertical wall space can help you to make more room while keeping your displays nice, neat and organized. You can use something like slatwall to affordable and attractively make space on the walls of your boutique. Use slatwall panels in spaces that are oddly shaped. Use slatwall accessories to hang just about any type of item on the wall. You will love how versatile your slatwall is, and it will help you make room for all the displays that you can think up.

About the Author: Ron Maier is the Vice President of S & L Store Fixtures, a leading online resource for retail displays, including mannequins, dress mannequin forms, female mannequins, slatwall and slatwall panels. For more information, please visit http://www.slstoredisplays.com.

Visual Display Tips

Creating displays can help you to nurture your crafty side. The most effective displays always have a theme and seem inspired. Inspiring displays inspire customers to feel as passionately as you about the merchandise that you’re selling. Boutiques are famous for creating memorable displays that keep customers curious about what you’ll do next. Whether you run a boutique or larger retail store, you can use these tips to make your displays more interesting and effective.

1) Do some research before you begin. Surf the web, go window shopping, and look at magazines to get your creative juices flowing. You can get ideas that help you to decide on a theme or a focus for your display. Consider the merchandise, of course, but also think about color to set the mood, the season, the promotion, or the theme of your store. Once you get an idea, the rest will quickly come together.

2) Consider running your ideas past your employees. Give them a theme and ask them for their ideas. Sometimes your employees are your best asset because they see what grabs customers’ attention every day, out on the floor. Hold a contest to inspire your staff to be more involved in the success of the store. You may be surprised at how creative some of your employees may be.

3) Once you have your idea, decide on a budget. Remember that less is often more and you don’t necessarily have to spend a fortune on a display. You may want to buy a few key pieces for the display. Try to buy things that can be reused in the future so that you can get the most bang for your buck. Tables or racks that fold, props that inflate, and decorations that lay flat are easiest to store for future use. Mannequins can be customized to fit a lot of different types of displays and can stay in good shape for many years. Investing in this proven seller is never a bad move.

4) When setting up your display, keep balance and focus in mind. Start by setting up your focal point. Too many focal points will not draw attention like a central focus will. The focus doesn’t have to be in the center of the display. Good visuals are hardly ever perfectly centered. They’re often more interesting if they’re not. A customer may pass twenty window displays with centered mannequins and hardly notice them, and then the one that tells a story and isn’t perfectly centered will be the one to turn their head.

5) Use lighting, signage, whatever you need to draw attention to your focal point. You can even use more mannequins to direct attention to the focal point. Have them looking at the main character or feature in your display.

6) Make room for interesting visual displays throughout your store or boutique. Use slatwall panels and slatwall accessories to free up space on the sales floor. You can use the slatwall itself to create interesting slatwall displays. Using vertical space can help you to better manage your merchandise so that your displays remain the center of attention.

About the Author: Ron Maier is the Vice President of S & L Store Fixtures, a leading online resource for retail displays, including mannequins, dress mannequin forms, female mannequins, slatwall and slatwall panels. For more information, please visit http://www.slstoredisplays.com.

Managing Small Retail Spaces

Retail spaces can get cramped for a number of reasons. You may have decided to expand and offer more products. Maybe you are offering an entire new department. You could just be running out of storage space. Or, you might have chosen a small space to have an affordable retail space in a good location. Whatever your reasons, you need a way to deal with the small space without sacrificing sales or image.

Not having much room means that you need to get creative. Creative displays are what make boutiques so popular today. Displays need to be effective and satisfy needs for the customers. For example, when a customer enters a store and approaches a display, they have many questions going through their heads. They are wondering if they like the product. They then consider what other people will think. They imagine how the garments would make them feel. Then they check out quality, price, and the availability of their size.

Setting up your displays with these customer questions in mind will help you to overcome some of the hurdles that retailers face. You can’t necessarily only put out a few sizes of each item, or customers will assume that you probably don’t have their size and they won’t go through the process. You don’t want everything to look like clearance. If there are fully stocked displays, then customers feel like they are getting something new and popular. If the inventory is low, they might assume that you are not restocking this item for some reason. It could be quality, popularity, or some other unknown that turns them off when they look at the display.

So, this leaves you with a predicament. You need to save space. You want to offer more and more products. But, you don’t want to put out skimpy amounts of each thing. Even more important, you don’t want your store to get crowded and look like a bargain bin. The solution is to utilize retail displays designed to conquer this particular problem.

The most popular and cost effective solution is to use slatwall panels. You can install slatwall in a store and take full advantage of vertical space. You can hang and display hundreds of items on the walls of your store or boutique, even in a small amount of square footage. This can leave the floor open to creating more attractive and elaborate displays.

Using slatwall not only saves space, but it makes your store easy to shop in. All of your items can face outward toward the customer. Customers can shop without touching anything. They can see what each item looks like and also see that your inventory is stocked. If something’s running low, you can simply switch out the bar for a shorter one to make your store look continuously stocked.

Using slatwall and slatwall panels in your store will make you and your customers happier.

About the Author: Ron Maier is the Vice President of S & L Store Fixtures, a leading online resource for retail displays, including mannequins, dress mannequin forms, female mannequins, slatwall and slatwall panels. For more information, please visit http://www.slstoredisplays.com.