Tips for Boutique Owners: Choosing Wholesale Clothing That Fits Your Store Style

Contributed post.

What’s your store’s style? This is a question that many new boutique owners face when they are tasked with seamlessly combining products with ambiance. After all, you want to set the tone and the mood for moving product, and having an image and vibe that is congruent with what you are selling is really the first step. At Dear Lover, we have boiled down this often lengthy, complex process into five steps that can be applied universally to boutiques to help them select the products that are appropriate for their market.

Know Your Customer

Before you start stocking your shelves, you need to know your customers. What is your ideal demographic? What are their dreams, aspirations, goals, and motivations? You want to tap into the psychology of purchasing and to do that you need to be immediately relatable. In other words, whatever you are promising, you have to authentically deliver it. Whether that is a preppy clothing vibe or something a bit edgier, you need to make sure that everything fits in with other product offerings. Nothing can stand alone. You always want to think of attachment rate as well as the number of items each customer purchases, looking for complementarities between different products.

Know Yourself

What can you deliver? What can your team reasonably achieve? Here, you want to think of scale in addition to quality customer service. It is better to hone in on a few things and master them than to focus on quantity. Think of the customer experience and work backward, looking for ways to improve it at each step.

Visions of the Present and the Future

Where do you want to take the boutique in the future? You and your team need to develop a roadmap with goals and tentative timelines for what you want to achieve and when. Where do you see the boutique going? How large do you want to scale? How many offerings can you realistically maintain? These questions will help you understand your current situation as well as where you want to be down the line.

Bridging the Gap Between Aspiration and Reality Through Product

Find what drives your market and emphasize it but also look at trends and take small risks here and there. You want to push the envelope without appearing to do so. This involves carrying relevant products as well as anticipating what your customers will want in the future. In this regard, data on your customers as well as social media can help clue your boutique into what’s working in the market.

Delivering Consistently and Pivoting Constantly

Along with the above tips is the need for consistency while managing constant change. These two things might sound contradictory but they are not. You have to change and evolve with your customers’ tastes in order to stay relevant yet you also need to provide the same level of relevant, quality service as before. Quality, experience, and what your team can manage all combine to create a successful firm and knowing how to master your system is as integral to success as providing relevant products to your customers.