Making the Most of a Small Boutique

Boutiques are usually located in small retail spaces. Making the most of that space can have a real impact on the success of your business. Selling what you want to in your boutique can be challenging because there is usually just not enough room to fit everything. You can cram it in, but it takes away from the atmosphere and appeal, which is exactly why people want to shop there. However, if you go at it in the right way, then you can really maximize the use of the space that you have and make everything more visible than it was before, optimizing the shopping experience for your customers.

Do you have a lot of crowded garment racks? If they get too full or if you have too many of them, they can really make your boutique look like a sea of things that nobody wants to dig through. Garment racks are great for displaying clothing, but you don’t want to fill them completely up or put them too close together. People don’t like to be back to back with other shoppers while they’re digging through to try to find their size. In fact, people don’t like to dig through even to look at what you have. So, you need a space saving solution.

This solution is slatwall. You can install slatwall panels on every wall of your store. This one change can change your entire store. By using slatwall, you can display your clothing and accessories however you like. You can have them facing outward. You can have them lined up on a hanging bar. You can use hooks, shelves, brackets, whatever you need. Slatwall accessories are very inexpensive and are very versatile. You can move them around anytime that you’d like. This can help you to uniquely display new or promotional items and accommodate more merchandise.

By using the vertical space, you free up floor space. Using slatwall is a versatile, cost effective option for creating space. When the vertical space is used, you can start using more of the horizontal space by using longer brackets and deeper shelves. You won’t even notice the tiny bit of extra space that it uses. You can make your displays more dynamic by hanging mannequin forms directly on the wall. You can fill in holes by spreading out your brackets, shelves and bars. You can make more room by fitting things together more tightly. You will have achieved what every retailer strives for, and that is to always look fully stocked and never crowded, despite how much you have to display.

You can truly make your boutique into the area you’ve imagined without sacrificing the amount of merchandise that you sell or having to upgrade to a larger retail space.

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.

Make Room in a Small Boutique

If you run a boutique, chances are space is an issue. Many boutiques are run by individual owners who simply cannot invest a lot of money on store space. Therefore, it becomes important to make the most of the space that you have available. Whether you’ve expanded your inventory, or you’ve always needed more room, you can use these tips to help you make room by following these steps.

First, you need to get rid of merchandise that just isn’t moving. Have a sidewalk sale or set up a clearance area and sell off what you can to make some room. Floor space and garment racks should not be crowded, so do what you can to consolidate, but don’t pack things together so tightly that no one is interested in digging through them. Move some things to storage if you have to.

Make use of the vertical space in your store. A popular option for retail merchandising is to have gridwall or slatwall installed. It is fairly inexpensive and can save you loads of space. Plus, there are other benefits to using it.

With a few simple accessories like hanging bars, shelves and hooks, you can turn your grid wall or slat wall into a merchandising and promotion dream. Using gridwall and slatwall systems puts your merchandise up where people can actually see what you have at a glance. Since customers often use their first impressions to determine whether or not they will buy anything, letting them know what you have when they walk in is a great idea.

When the floor is more spacious and open, you are less likely to lose merchandise to shoplifters. Gridwall and slatwall are loved by retailers everywhere because of this feature. Your employees can see shoppers from all around when there is no place to hide. Having crowded clothing racks just a few feet apart gives thieves the sense of security that they need to shoplift.

Clearing out floor space by using gridwall and slatwall makes your store look more inviting. It makes it more user-friendly, clean and organized. It also creates open spaces that you can use for more interesting displays, like mannequin displays. You can even hang mannequin torso forms on the ends of your hanging racks that protrude from your gridwall or slatwall. This is an effective way of letting your customers know what your clothing looks like when it is worn and drawing attention to your items.

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, gridwall and slatwall store fixtures. For more information, please visit http://www.slstoredisplays.com.