You Need Deep Pockets Using This Type Of Fashion Advertising

This is a classic example of the "image" style of fashion advertising which I saw in a magazine recently…

Why do I say you need deep pockets to run this fashion advertisement? Someone has paid a large sum of money $1,000 or more to run this advertisement to ‘brand’ their clothing label and fashion business. This "image" style of advertising, unless run frequently (at a significant cost), often will not have an impact to the sales of the fashion business. Deep pockets = lots of money wasted … ouch!

How To Advertise Your Fashion Retail Boutique Store

Imagine – today a small boutique fashion retail store opens for the first time. How does the owner attract people and potential customers – where no store brand, awareness or recognition existed before?

If, like most fashion retail store owners – they buy $50,000 to $200,000 in stock, make the shop nice, and then open the doors hoping to attract customers. Perhaps, if they have any money left over – they place a few fashion advertisements, showing off a new season garment, shoes, jewellery or accessories. This is a very slow way to advertise and market a fashion retail store. I’ll let you in on a little ‘secret’…

Most retailers, want a customer to make a sale (i.e. to make profit). Whilst the smart retailer, wants to make a sale to get a customer!

This is profound. I hope you see the distinction.

If a fashion store can build a strong clientele base quickly – the store can achieve profitability much sooner. The alternative however, is years of slowly rising revenue using traditional fashion advertising which in most cases is not very effective.

Most fashion retailers still rely on the same techniques to advertise and market their store – where ‘smarter’, more efficient methods are available today.

Will Mobile Phone Shopping Affect Fashion Retailing & Marketing?

What do you think about the above article from the Wall St Journal? It’s an important shopping trends not only for US consumers but for Australian shoppers as well.

Fashion retailers, importers, designers, wholesalers, manufacturers and anyone that sells a fashion ‘product’ will be affected by the growing trend towards researching and even purchasing fashion online.
Once wary and shy consumers are now experienced online consumers by the use of ebay, Google, Gumtree and even Facebook.

Whilst many traditional brick’s'morter fashion retailers look at online shopping as a possible way to reduce their overheads (offering more stock without increasing floor space and reducing staff costs) it means they are now competing even more.

Whilst fashion retailing is less exposed to the move to online shopping due to the need for consumers to ‘try-it-on’ – certain fashion merchandise and products could be – such as shoes, bags, belts, hats, jewellery and so on.

Fashion marketing, branding and the retail experience for the customer has to be even better so that consumers WANT to make the trip to a retail store. This factor has become more and more important and may mean the difference between success or failure in fashion retailing.

Gerry Harvey, You and Online Shopping

Wow, what a big controversy recently in Australia about online retailing and whether people should pay GST when ordering online from overseas suppliers. Big heavy weight retailers like Gerry Harvey from Harvey Norman and others claim that they are at a disadvantage because people can buy online (overseas) and not pay GST. How would the trend in overseas (online) purchases affect FASHION retailers? I still firmly believe the overall trend is still in the (physical store) fashion retailer’s favour.

Here’s my list of the advantages and disadvantages for the CONSUMER when buying FASHION jewellery, footwear and clothing online…

	FASHION RETAIL STORE	ONLINE RETAILER
Ability to try on the item / view the item	Yes. I believe this is one of the most important reasons why people visit stores. We all know that the actual size of clothing or footwear varies between brands and even by date of manufacture. The ‘cut’ can also make a huge difference.	We ‘hope’ we’ve ordered the right size. Even with jewellery – it can look great in the photo but disappointing in real-life.
Quality #1	We can examine the particular ‘item’ before we buy it and take it home.	The item may arrive damaged or was damaged at manufacture or somewhere along the distribution channel.
Quality #2	We can ‘see’ and feel the quality of the item before we purchase it	The photo may differ to the real-life item
Service	Varies – some staff at certain fashion stores have good product knowledge and some don’t. Sometimes you get friendly, prompt service and sometimes you don’t.	May offer more information on their website about the item. Personal service not available.
Availability	If it’s in store, we can buy it and take it home straight away – instant gratification.	May take 1-3 weeks for delivery
Price	A fashion retailer has higher overheads – usually high rent and staff expenses, so this is built into the price of what we pay.	Usually lower. No GST for items under $1,000 (overseas orders only). Offset by having to pay for shipping.
Exchange	Some stores offer the option to exchange items if they are not worn.	Usually no exchange is allowed. Besides, you have to pay shipping to send the item back.

 

Out this list of products, the ones that I feel will be mostly affected by the trend to online shopping (in descending order) are:

1. Bags (most likely to be purchased online)
2. Jewellery
3. Footwear
4. Clothing

Sure, some ‘sales’ may be lost to online shopping but when it comes to FASHION jewellery, footwear and clothing – most consumers understand the benefits of buying locally.

Let me know that you think?

What To Do If Your Fashion Retail Sales Are Down

The GFC and the rising interest rate cycle has certainly affected retail sales in the past two years.

However, certain clever retailers have been able to leverage their fashion marketing and branding to maintain their revenue and even grow during this time. For the rest – recent times have been challenging. So let’s examine what is the role of the fashion store owner.

What NOT to do if your fashion store is quiet I was contacted by a fashion marketing newsletter subscriber (a store owner) recently who said this (word for word…) I know – it’s incredible… …."I’m finding that we do not have time to read the ideas let alone implement them…"

I also had on my computer one of the original emails from this particular store owner – here is the important excerpt:

We own two clothing stores and have been in business for over 6 years. Although we haven’t made a profit in those 6 years! Our major goal, of course, is to turn a profit.

Yes, incredible. This owner says they don’t have time to implement our Smart Fashion Marketing strategies (actually proven to work – not theory), yet confess to spending 100% of her time on SHOPKEEPING ACTIVITIES!

This is real important – if you are fashion retail store… are you in the shopkeeping business or in the business of marketing of your store and brand?

I hope you answered MARKETING!

Absolutely – at least 4 hours a week of your time should be devoted to marketing, promotion and branding activities. It will only cost you $80 or so to free up those 4 hours (i.e. you pay a casual to do your shopkeeping work).

It’s YOUR role as the retail store owner to WORK ON your marketing and branding – no one else you employ will have the passion about your business that you do (you can, of course, leverage your time by utilising the services of a marketing house like ours).

Remember – you have to think like a marketer, and hand most of your shopkeeping activities to staff if you want to enjoy healthly profits and see your fashion store(s) grow!

Using The Mailbox Flyer Fashion Marketing Strategy Successfully

"Fashion Retailer Brings In An Extra 51 People In One Week!" – but, first a little background information…

Often fashion retailers approach me and say they don’t have a lot of money to spend on advertising. If their fashion shop is in a residential area, or in a suburban shopping centre, I often recommend the mailbox flyer marketing strategy.

A mailbox flyer is a one page pamphlet stuffed into residential mailboxes (letter boxes).

Many retailers may have tried flyers in the past, but stopped because they didn’t get a good result. However, John’s Shoe Store brought in an additional 51 people in one week last month (they tracked them) using the flyer from our ‘Customer Marketing Sales Kit‘.

Getting a good result from a flyer design down to simplicity with a marketing message that entices the reader to visit the store.

Often retailers will focus too much on a ‘branding’ message rather than a design focusing on new styles and looks. Sure, you can achieve a similar result from Community Newspaper advertising, but occasionally I like to ‘mix-up’ the marketing to reach local, surrounding homes for stronger store recognition and branding. Oh yeah, a tip: I prefer the A5 size (1/2 A4) as it doesn’t require folding (as you would need to do for the A4 size), you get double the amount of flyers when printing, and the A5 size is easy for someone to put in letter boxes.

Getting Good Results From Your Fashion Advertising

Having a quiet week? Want to bring in more store traffic – right now?

Good, consistent store traffic year round is the holy grail of fashion retailing. There’s no point spending money on good stock, hiring the best sales staff, having the nicest store with the best customer service if people don’t come in. Ensuring regular people traffic is one of the major challenges for most fashion retailers.

Our Fashion Retail Insiders know the twelve (12) specific ways to bring in more traffic to a fashion store and they understand the specific tactics that make them successful. Many of the twelve traffic strategies will be familiar to you, like … print media advertising, internet fashion advertising, good building signage, referral programs, and so on…

However, in order to get a good result from any fashion advertising or marketing campaign, a specific tactic or marketing message, is required.

For many smaller retailers especially (and larger fashion retailers too), the focus needs to be on generating a customer. Yes, absolutely branding is important, but if it’s the sole message in the advertisement, it will be a costly expense for the retailer – as we say in the marketing game – "you need deep pockets". A better way, is to employ a marketing message that brings in paying customers AND builds your brand at the same time. That way your fashion advertising and marketing will pay for itself.

Take for example; Fashion Retail Insider  Gill from John’s Shoe Store. Gill took one of our designs and tested a very small advertisement in the local community newspaper – it brought in $1,382.70. Granted it was a very small advertisement and dollar sale, but you can see the potential of running a similar advert weekly. i.e. $1,382.70 x 52 weeks is $71,900.

I’m sure adding almost $72,000 in annual revenue would be welcome by any fashion retailer.

Not only is the revenue important, but see what else happens :

• 12 new customers were introduced to the business (from one week) – that would be 624 new customers a year. Those customers would return to make additional purchases and refer other people to the store, and,
• The retail store would achieve brand awareness with the readers of the local community newspaper.

And that’s a good result from fashion advertising!

Retail Shopping Centre Fashion Advertising

Do you have a retail store located in a shopping centre? If so, I’m sure you’re familiar with the extremely high rent and outgoings bill you receive every month. Besides the building and services component – a portion of your monthly fee to the shopping centre company also covers centre promotion and advertising. It’s the shopping centre’s role to bring in people so they can charge the retailer a fee for the space. Nothing new with that. However, it’s actually a good idea to know how much of your annual rent is attributed to receiving store traffic (browsers and customers).

Let say you have a 30m2 store. Figure 1 : Your current shopping centre rent (let’s use $50,000 per annum for simpicity). Figure 2 : The cost of renting a 30m2 office in a street in the back lots of an industrial area (let’s say it costs $15,000 per annum). The difference $35,000, is the annual cost paid for the ‘better’ location (shopping centre v.s. back lots).

Some retailers choose to have a store located in a quieter street location and not in a shopping centre, but in order to create the same revenue, much more money needs to be spent on fashion advertising.

i.e. Shopping Centre = high rent, lower individual store fashion advertising expenses.

Quiet location = lower rent, higher individual store fashion advertising expenses (in order to produce a similar annual revenue).

There is aways that trade-off. Whether one option is better or not for your store really comes down to your level of experience in fashion retailing, your brand and sales system.

Will A Web Site Make You More Money For Your Fashion Business?

I’m sure every fashion retailer would be in favour of having a web site for their business – but not every retailer actually has one. Why is that?

As always, I believe the question comes down to cost and return-on-investment (ROI). Websites aren’t cheap. There is a cost to designing an unique site and the hours of graphic and web programming involved. In order to figure out the return-on-investment for a fashion retailer, let’s look at the some of the benefits of having a good website :

• 24 / 7 convenience : A customer or a potential new customer can browse your website to look at the latest styles and fashions you have available.
• Customer assistance : A customer or a potential new customer can look up your contact or location details. They could view the outside of your store, it’s location on a Google map, or find what your opening hours are.
• Mailing list : A customer or a potential new customer can sign up for your fashion eNewsletter which is a great strategy for increasing sales.
• Web search : A potential new customer who has never heard about your retail store before comes across your website after a search for a particular brand.
• Recommendation :A friend of a potential new customer recommends your store and that person visits your web site to find out more.
• Branding : If you are seeking to build your brand, a good web site will assist in the brand-awareness process.
• Publicity : Someone browsing the internet, comes across some news or information about your store on another site and then visits your website.
• Credibility : A good retail web site lends credibility to the business.
• Online Advertising option : A web site is a requirement for online fashion advertising. Online advertising is an effective way to bring more customers to your business.
• Online sales : Generate sales 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. People visit your site and make a purchase. Generally speaking, online sales are better suited to fashion items like jewellery, footwear and accessories. But, clothing can be sold too.

I’m sure you’re now impressed with some of the major benefits of having a fashion store web site, but in order to maximise those benefits the web site needs to be designed in a certain way. Keep an eye out for my next post…

Fashion Merchandising Tips To Increase Sales

Visual merchandising is the activity of promoting the sale of goods by their presentation. Here are some of benefits: Improve your store brand Increase store traffic Increase sales

Where and how fashion clothing, accessories, jewellery and footwear are displayed can make a big impact in a number of ways, including:

• Style. Establishing visual elements that are consistent with the store brand. For example, signage colour and sizes, lighting, and even the shelf racks say something about the store.
• Entrance displays. Effective displays will increase store traffic as people walking by will be ‘drawn’ in.
• Presentation. Sales will increase if the fashion merchandise presentation is appealing to customers.
• Location. The front of the store, middle, back, side, etc; can make a massive difference to sales of particular items. That’s why most fashion stores change their layout frequently.

But, don’t forget to monitor the effects on sales after changes to the visual presentation. Otherwise the process becomes subjective, rather than scientific. The visual merchandising main aim is to increase store traffic and sales, not to create extra work for your staff in your fashion retail store.

Low Cost Fashion Advertising – The Trusty Old Mailbox Flyer

You know… a mailbox flyer – an A4 or A5 sized one page pamphlet stuffed into residential mailboxes (letter boxes). Many fashion retailers overlook the humble mailbox flyer as a marketing strategy for producing more retail store traffic. I like mailbox flyers for apparel, clothing, footwear, and jewellery stores – they are quick and simple to produce, low cost and very effective in targeting people that live around the store.

For the cost of around $470 you can typically reach around 5,000 homes. The ‘trick’ is to produce a flyer that gets results. Many retailers who may have tried flyers in the past, stopped because they didn’t get a result and came to the incorrect conclusion that flyers don’t work. They do!

Effective flyer design comes down to simplicity with a marketing message that entices the reader to visit the store. Often retailers will focus too much on a ‘branding’ message rather than a design focusing on new styles and looks. As we have created many mailbox flyers for our clients we have a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t. If you like – send us a copy of your mailbox flyer and we’ll be happy to critique it for you.

All About Fashion Advert Placement

Planning your fashion advertising campaign

Once you have decided what style of fashion advert you want – branding, benefit, sale/offer or event; you need to then think about your target audience before choosing a media to advertise in.

(If you’re not sure which style of fashion advert to use – click here to see our previous post on fashion advertising examples).

Target market questions… What are the demographics and the psychographics of your customers? Are you targeting females from the age of 18 to 30? Are you trying to reach older women with higher disposable incomes? To find out, take this short questionnaire.

Fashion advertising target market

1. Sex? Male or female or both.
2. Age bracket?
3. Price bracket?
4. Style?
5. Use? Day wear, evening wear, club wear, casual, formal, bridal, cocktail, etc.
6. Emotional appeal? To look sexy, to look younger, to look older, to look professional, to look wealthy and successful, to look powerful and in control (i.e. business women and men), to look desirable, fun loving, thrill seeking, etc.

The next step is to find a photographer, models and items of fashion (clothing, footwear and jewellery) that communicate that message in one visual image. If you’ve advertised to brand your fashion business and labels before you’ll know all about it.

What’s our take on fashion advertising? Simply, almost all fashion businesses and retailers prefer to focus entirely on expensive advertising to generate new customers with little or no effort taken to retain customers using good internal branding or marketing systems. Such systems maximise customer retention which in turn creates more word-of-mouth advertising and referrals – much cheaper!

For more information about how to achieve this in your fashion business, request a copy of our ‘Marketing Secrets Of Top Fashion Retailers!‘ – click here to download your copy.

Image and Branding for a Fashion Business

Image and Branding is a strong motivator for fashion retailers but what do these concepts actually mean?

Simply, ‘Image’ is the perception (picture) that consumers have about a particular business at any one point in time. Whereby, ‘Brand’ is the relationship between the business and the consumer’s values. For example, when a consumer looks to purchase a running shoe they may think of Nike because of it’s alignment with winning and achieving.

Image and branding has everything to do with identifying your target market, identifying the values that are important to your target market and then creating an image and a brand that relates to those values.

Trying to cover all demographics and values is not recommended because it would be very difficult to achieve effective branding economically. The consumer will be disappointed with the product and the business.

For example, promoting luxury airline tickets whilst actually hearding travellers into small seats and delivering poor customer service will upset those consumers and word will get out and damage the ‘Brand’. Conversely, entering the marketplace promoting high levels of service at a cheap price, will hurt margins for the business and will unsustainable in the long-term.

Typically a brand will consist of an unique mix of values for a fashion business, such as :

• Consumer benefits,
• Style,
• Durability (clothes, shoes and jewellry)
• Quality,
• Price,
• Consumer age target (e.g. children, young adults, mature adults, Generation X, etc),
• Image projection (conservative, hip-hop, professional business, modern, sportswear, etc),
• Culture,
• and so on.

Branding can also be broken down into ‘external’ and ‘internal’. External branding is prodominately used to create new customers for the business via mass advertising, such as print, internet, radio and television.

Internal branding is reminding existing customers that you value their business of which the aim is to increase repeat sales from those customers. Internal branding will typically use such media as email, SMS, direct mail and the telephone.

Creating an image and a brand for fashion retailers is not about flashy and slick advertisements. It’s about getting your key customers (target market) to recognise your business as their prefered choice for the products you provide.