Boost Your Boutique with Emily Benson

1:30.5: I'm seeing boutiques run ads and they're one of two things: They're either targeting me with “Come to our store opening” and they're in Virginia, I'm not in Virginia. Or they’re advertising denim, which I hate.

3:24.3: This is the phenomenon I'm seeing in Facebook ads. It’s a video and two photos the size of your phone screen. In the video the boutique owner or model is pulling on the side of their jeans, basically showing they’re form-fitting but stretchy.

4:43.9: In the past five years, denim has become really saturated in terms of how many boutiques are selling it. The main brand I’m talking about is Judy Blue. Because they're a wholesaler, they distribute to a lot of places.

6:28.7: I'm the one that says, sell what you love. People fight with me all the time about this saying “No, you shouldn't sell what you love.” Yes, you should! 

8:13.2: The way Judy Blue has grown in the past four to five years has been phenomenal. What did they do? They realized that people wanted stretchy jeans. They realized women want stretch, and they shifted their assortment to fit that. They also started carrying plus sizes. 

8:56.9: What Judy Blue did is partner with at least one, if not several, big boutiques. That made the boutiques the resource for Judy Blue Jeans, almost like a distributor. But what happens when you have that much inventory? You have to advertise it and become an expert in that category to move units. 

10:41.0: Judy Blue has given themselves an opportunity to get to more people because they end up having more reach. They basically partner with big influencers and big boutiques.

11:10.5: I would call a big boutique, someone doing over 10 million a year. If you're doing 100, 200, 300 million a year, you're not really a boutique anymore. I think a boutique is really five million and under. Your footprint is small.

12:12.5: The stretchy gene ads. You've seen them, I've seen them. There was a moment when I saw three different boutiques advertising the exact same ad. There's some good stuff about that. One is that this boutique is becoming known for this. That is their thing and they know their customers love it.

13:23.7: Become known for something. That's what's going to make you stand out. Learn from this. Think about how Judy Blue, said, oh my gosh, there's a niche in the market. How can we make better denim and quality products stick at a really nice price where we know our boutiques need to be? And then how do we partner with some really big boutiques to get ourselves out there. Get to their customers, give them exclusive styles, and maybe give them a first look at things. Can you do that with certain customers? Can you do that with certain influencers that you work with? Or even just yourself?

14:05.3: You could create a VIP email list where it's ten of your top customers and you email them first with “We just got new styles in” or “Here's my top five favorite styles”. Maybe you sell $100, $200, or $300 out the gate. That's going to fuel you to be able to launch to more people.

14:33.6: It looks like a coordinated effort to grow your business through partnering with someone bigger than you. Over time, that's going to be more and more strategic for more vendors and more brands.

14:57.8: This is your strategy too. Be good at one thing, be good at one product category. Be really good at knowing your customer.

15:33.4: When you are ready to do ads because you're known for something because this is like your thing and your customers and you know your customer...

1:36.8: Now a lot of boutiques will start online or they'll have one brick and mortar and there's all these opportunities to sort of rent a space inside. We see it a lot in salons.

2:09.8: If you are just online, it's definitely a good opportunity for you to be in front of people and see what the sales look like and see how things can change for you from an assortment perspective and from an ideal customer perspective.

4:22.5: My biggest question is how would I mark up these items where we are both making money on the deal? 

4:34.9: She started listening to my podcast and taking courses and attending retreats, and she's grown from a thousand dollars, barely a thousand dollars a month to making at least $25,000 a month. And she's only open five days a week, six hours a day. 

5:52.5: I would, number one, learn about who's the ideal customer in this pickleball situation. 

6:33.9: You're going to have to build into every product a margin where he gets a cut and you get a cut. Now, how do we do that in a way where, it doesn't blow the budget too, right? 

7:14.8: How often will you have to change merchandise? Will this be monthly? Will this be biweekly? Right? Are you gonna have a branded set of things?

8:14.9: My next step would be to build out an assortment plan and say, what do I think this person needs? What do I think realistically they're gonna buy too? 

9:24.9: I think when you start a new business, which let me remind you, this is a hundred percent starting a new business. When you are in this situation, you get to start from scratch, but you already have all the knowledge that you have currently. Right? So, I think it would be really nice to consider, like, what's the assortment, what is the space he's gonna give me?

12:10.2: A lot of it lies in the detail of the product. You don't know how much money you can make until you know how much space he's gonna give you. So you know, kind of your per square foot money that you wanna make. 

12:41.7: I think the big crux of it is figuring out are you gonna pay him rent and you invest in inventory and it's like you own a plot of land in his complex or is he partnering with you?

14:27.12: Another really good logistical question is how do I come up with a contract?

15:04.7: So the way I keep imagining it, to be honest with you is that you are renting space. Inside of his store, inside of his complex. So it's not his store, it's your store that you're renting.

16:04.1: You have to be able to run this and make money on its own without saying like, oh, this is great marketing.

18:50.4: I'm sure you can do research, maybe you play, but I would get to know that ideal customer, and this is the same if you were gonna do any popup or an event, like people used to invite me to do craft fairs. All the time at their church and I was like, thank you so much. Like I am so honored for the invitation. However, the craft fair customer is not my customer. 

Resources:

Visit Boutique Training Academy - If you want to make more money in your boutique or retail business you're in the right place. We'll guide you step by step in your journey through Boutiqueland.

NEW BOOK #TheRetailMindset available on

2:05.3: The fundamentals of retail are the fundamentals of retail. They don't change over time. What does change sometimes is marketing or building a brand.

2:44.3: I think it's important to take a step back and think about like, what about my business do I love? 

5:51.5: So whether you're new or you are established, or however you see yourself in the scope of what boutique land looks like for you, I want you to know that there is always room to grow and there is always room to maintain and stabilize.

16:36.4: Create an experience for your people, find them where they're at, whether that's social media, or online.

22:01.8: I started to hear what was going on and I realized that boutique owners have very little genuine consistent support outside of potential friends and family. 

23:57.2: And then combining it kind of with, with my experience in, in my own boutique, it was like people were doubling and tripling their sales numbers in three to 12 months. 

24:25.2: I saw that scaling someone's business not only increased the boutique owner's personal income, like because it increased that, it also helped boutique owners feel safer. I felt that they had time, freedom, and they were able to do things with their kids.

35:18.4: This year has been super weird and inflation on just straight up everything. And then shipping charges went up too. Because these corporations are charging more, they're taking advantage of small businesses. It just kind of all hit the fan this year in a really awkward way that it's just been difficult to navigate.

35:52.9: I guess the question now is when outrageous growth slows down, so like outrageous growth of 2020 and 2021, like what is the result? 

39:28.8: I think as established boutique owners we're just like really sick of new boutique owners coming in and just like trying to undercut everyone. It's just like, stop doing it. It's not cool. 

41:53.0: We as boutique owners need better options to buy inventory in a leaner and more efficient way. 

44:09.7: It's not okay for our industry as a whole to accept that boutiques are underpricing. If you have someone open up down the street and they're not charging enough, it is up to you established boutique owner. Go over there and be nice. Introduce yourself. Be like, Hey, listen, like I've been doing this a long time.

44:32.3: As established boutique owners, we need to start becoming leaders in this industry and pushing back on new people.

47:38.6: Boutiques are focused on what products make them the most money. Right? What works? Do what makes you more money based on your boutique? What are your top departments? 

48:13.5: You've gotta know what are your top departments. What's really working? Start to analyze your sales, okay? This is like what I've been doing with so many people. This is part of my process, is I, I help people understand how you analyze sales by department, by price point, by color, and by size.

51:22.2: I don't care if your buying plan is for your $ 2,000-a-month boutique or your $ 200,000-a-month boutique. I don't care. You need a buying plan, okay? You need to go to market. 

53:55.4: Your buy plan is a hundred percent based on your sales plan and then your markup. That's how we get accurate and we understand our sales, we know our sales data, we know our top sellers, and we know how to protect them through the buying plan moving...

1:10.5: we're talking about meta, which runs both Facebook and Instagram ads. 

1:33.8: I think this is something that you wanna do when you start to hit like three, five, $10,000 a month. So $3,000 to $10,000 months in your business. 

2:45.3: Facebook ads are really an additional way to continue showing people who already like you more of your stuff more often.

3:25.5: The easiest way for me to explain what a cold audience is, is that it's people who have never heard of you. They have never interacted with your brand. 

4:18.9: I always recommend starting with a warm audience, people who know you. Advertise to them because they're just going to buy more.

6:00.0: You will get a return. We have people who have spent a thousand dollars a month and they've made back $10,000. I once had a client who spent a hundred thousand dollars on ads that she and I were running kind of on the back end, just the two of us by ourselves. She made a million dollars off those ads one year.

7:21.1: Between knowing what to run ads for, you could really scale your business pretty big. So don't count yourself out for Facebook ads, Instagram ads, or meta ads.

Resources:

Visit Boutique Training Academy - If you want to make more money in your boutique or retail business you're in the right place. We'll guide you step by step in your journey through Boutiqueland.

NEW BOOK #TheRetailMindset available on Amazon

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2:33.4: And so I'm here to remind you that you are a very, very, very powerful being and that you get to decide, you get to have the choice about what it is that you want, where you wanna go. And so I want to tap into what might be holding you back.

3:27.4: One of the very first ways that I see people blocking themselves from having a great boutique is fear. Fear of success, fear of failure. Fear of what will other people think. Fear of I'm not good enough. Fear of what if I run out of money? 

5:08.6: It's okay to be nervous. It's okay to be in a space of feeling unsure about what could happen. It's okay. Feel that feeling. See it.

9:20.3: Anyone can set up a schedule, actually. But what I will tell you is that it takes you sticking to that schedule and it takes you deciding that you're gonna show up for that schedule.

10:34.4: I find a lot of people that start boutiques just aren't taking themselves seriously. They're not taking the business piece of it seriously. They think, oh, I can just dabble here and I can just dabble there and I can disappear, and I can come in and I can come out. Guys, consistency and patience is what builds a business.

12:30.4: So where in your business, again, are you blocking yourself? Where are you in fear not taking action around taking your business more seriously? Stepping up into more of a, what I call a CEO role, right? Boutique, CEO. 

17:19.0: The third piece of what's holding you back, I will tell you is accountability. What I see so often in my groups, what I see so often happen with boutique owners is we live in our world, our little lonely world, and we don't have the community of positive support.

17:57.4: Accountability is why we start to feel more responsible and more serious about our business. 

21:52.6: I want you to check in with yourself and ask yourself why you're not doing something about it. Why you're not showing up for your business, why you're not showing up for your life. Because something deeper is going on and something is blocking you. So get to that root cause, and start to take some action. 

Resources:

Visit Boutique Training Academy  - If you want to make more money in your boutique or retail business you're in the right place. We'll guide you step by step in your journey through Boutiqueland.

NEW BOOK #TheRetailMindset available on Amazon

Let’s be friends! 

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Mentioned in this episode:

Get your Seat in the Maximizing Your Boutique's Growth Potential Training

What the free live training session includes: - Identifying Your Uniqueness - Building an Effective Online Presence - Maximizing Sales in Person - Planning for Long-Term Success - Live Q&A session with Emily to address attendees' specific questions and concerns

May 15 Training

Resources:

Visit Boutique Training Academy - If you want to make more money in your boutique or retail business you're in the right place. We'll guide you step by step in your journey through Boutiqueland.

NEW BOOK #TheRetailMindset available on Amazon

Let’s be friends!

Facebook 

IG

Mentioned in this episode:

Overbought Webinar

OVERBOUGHT: A FREE Webinar for {Boutique Owners} Who Know They Have Too Much Inventory Sales have slowed. You don't have the right styles. It's almost Fall and your boutique's revenue growth feels like it needs a jolt. What if I told you if you start now, you can end this year with low stock, high bank balances and maybe even a tropical vacation in January. If you're making $10k or more per month consistently, I'm talking to you! The solution to your inefficiency with inventory is NOT adding dropshipping or print on demand. Let's just analyze your sales, adjust your buys and make you more money the old fashioned way. It's literally worked for hundreds of years and when it's done well, can be incredibly profitable. Product based businesses need to shift now and inventory is what truly moves the needle. Get this 90 minute FREE TRAINING NOW!

Overbought Training

Black Friday Masterclass Access

Head here: www.blackfridaymasterclass.com You'll Learn A 5-Step Holiday Specific Strategy that Will Increase Your Sales Between November and January (post holiday) By Up To 40%. Includes video trainings (90 min+ sessions) and a 23-page workbook * Video 1: Pick a Plan we will chat about the 'Superbowl' weekend of retail and then outline a plan that is specific to YOUR boutique business * Video 2: Create a Plan Having a profitable holiday season means that you need to plan your day-to-day Holiday weekend plan and outline your product/pricing assortment to support those goals. * Video 3: Maximize Your Profit The holidays are over, now what? The objective of day 3 is to give you ideas to create some marketing that prevents post-holiday sales plummet. Over 4 HOURS of recorded training!

Black Friday Masterclass

Resources:

Visit Boutique Training Academy - If you want to make more money in your boutique or retail business you're in the right place. We'll guide you step by step in your journey through Boutiqueland.

NEW BOOK #TheRetailMindset available on Amazon

Let’s be friends!

Facebook 

IG

Mentioned in this episode:

Get your Seat in the Maximizing Your Boutique's Growth Potential Training

What the free live training session includes: - Identifying Your Uniqueness - Building an Effective Online Presence - Maximizing Sales in Person - Planning for Long-Term Success - Live Q&A session with Emily to address attendees' specific questions and concerns

May 15 Training

2:03.3: When I was a new boutique owner with my business, the fashion truck, I avoided a lot of mistakes because I had corporate retail experience. That's why I'm here. I worked for over seven years for big companies like Abercrombie and Fitch Club, Monaco, in their corporate office as a buyer.

3:20.4: First and foremost, I knew that I should not have something for everyone. When you have something for everyone, you have nothing for no one.

4:21.0: The more niche and narrow you can get with your ideal customer, really understanding who they are, how old they are, keep it tight, like 10 years.

5:27.3: I hate to say this, but most people come to me when they're really far down the road and they've bought way too much inventory. When you start buying inventory, you've got to track it.

7:10.5: The other big mistake I see people make is that they just are on every single platform. They think I have to be on TikTok dancing and going viral. I have to be doing reels. I have to have a Facebook group, a Facebook page. It's too much.

7:24.9: When you first start out, you've really got to focus on one, two, maybe three platforms where you can repurpose content, you can stay consistent on everything and really focus on being good for your ideal customer in those small places.

10:30.4: No one remembers what's new arrivals and not, you could re-show things over and over for a long time, and there's always gonna be those people who are like, oh, I didn't see that, or, and then there's gonna be the people who are like, oh, I've seen that eight times and I still don't want it.

Resources:

Visit Boutique Training Academy - If you want to make more money in your boutique or retail business you're in the right place. We'll guide you step by step in your journey through Boutiqueland.

NEW BOOK #TheRetailMindset available on Amazon

Let’s be friends!

Facebook 

IG

Mentioned in this episode:

Get your Seat in the Maximizing Your Boutique's Growth Potential Training

What the free live training session includes: - Identifying Your Uniqueness - Building an Effective Online Presence - Maximizing Sales in Person - Planning for Long-Term Success - Live Q&A session with Emily to address attendees' specific questions and concerns

May 15 Training

Thanks for listening! I'd love a review and rating on your podcast player if you liked what you heard! Links you'll need from this episode: Overworked and Underpaid Training: www.boutiquetrainingacademy.com/underpaid State of the Boutique Industry Webinar: www.boutiquetrainingacademy.com/state How to Start a Clothing Boutique On Demand Training: www.boutiquetrainingacademy.com/registration-page

Thanks for listening! I'd love a review and rating on your podcast player if you liked what you heard!

Links you'll need from this episode:

Maximizing Your Boutique's Growth Potential: Strategies for Success from a Retail Pro

https://www.boutiquetrainingacademy.com/maximize

Overworked and Underpaid Training: www.boutiquetrainingacademy.com/underpaid

State of the Boutique Industry Webinar: www.boutiquetrainingacademy.com/state

How to Start a Clothing Boutique On Demand Training: www.boutiquetrainingacademy.com/registration-page

Mentioned in this episode:

Get your Seat in the Maximizing Your Boutique's Growth Potential Training

What the free live training session includes: - Identifying Your Uniqueness - Building an Effective Online Presence - Maximizing Sales in Person - Planning for Long-Term Success - Live Q&A session with Emily to address attendees' specific questions and concerns

May 15 Training