1:04.0 My name is Darlene Mitchell and I am a retail business strategist. And my strength really is around inventory and profitability. So I help business boutique owners. Understanding inventory strategies so they can have legacy, not just so they can have a business, but they can have a legacy business, a business that stays around.
1:32.8 I was in corporate retail for 25 plus years. And what I do now is exactly what I did in corporate retail
1:51.4 I'm teaching my clients what I learned in big retail and fortune 500 retail.
2:12.7 There's a lot of money. There's a lot of trajectory. Like it's a great career, I think for anyone interested in fashion or selling or like how products get to the floor.
2:29.8 You are not born with this knowledge. Retail math is very different math than math.
5:43.5 So like a buyer or a merchant, like depending on what the company kind of called it, that's like the lead business person now who I think is like the most similar to like a boutique owner.
11:06.2 I don't care what your markup is. Any of that, you're pricing yourself out of the business. If you don't get that, what are you doing to get that track again?
12:17.3 We planned out every promotion. We knew post promotions would happen. They rarely were reactionary.
12:45.5 I think that a lot of people in the boutique space think that it's okay. To constantly run reactive sales because they're like, well, they're running it. The big companies are running it, but we're not seeing again behind the scenes, the look that Darlene and I are always going to give you is like, that is planned.
13:39.7 It's heavy duty math. And a lot of people are just not getting that. And to your point, they're running these reactionary sales. I'm like, well, you plan to run that sale? Do you need to run that sale? Or are you just doing it because someone else is doing it? Does your business require that?
15:25.4 We let a competitor dictate our business. No, that's awful. Yeah, that was awful. It was awful. And imagine the buyers and everyone who put all this work in to develop this product line and we were discounting it like crazy because we were watching what a competitor was doing.
16:13.8 I think most boutique owners, most, you know, I wouldn't say retail businesses doing under 5 million. They're a little messy behind the scenes. They're a little weird. Like I think until people start to make real money, do they think of investing in someone like a planner?
17:04.8 financial planning and your profit and loss statement is really different from your inventory management.
17:33.2 Every quarter we look at what's our intention for this next quarter. What's our sales intention? What's our profit intention? Before we place product before we buy product, what's our intention first?
18:03.0 Understand how you show value to that customer.
18:22.4 There are a couple of things you do before you even get to the product. Because all those things, everything has to mix for your product mix and your position, right? Because if you just go in and buy products at the right, wrong margin, and it's, and by the way, everyone, it's not find a cost times four to get a four times markup. That is not, that's not a strategy. That's just, that's reckless, right? That's a little reckless. So you want to do all those other things to understand before you buy the product. Yeah. Right. I love it. So position. Person. Pricing. Product. And then the fifth and bonus is promotion
20:18.5 2024 feels like a year where we can kind of lead with how we want to Move forward in the boutique.
20:42.8 what I believe in boutique land is that those who are purchasing heavily from other vendors. Are going to have a hard time, but those who are developing their own product will rise to the top because that customer is only coming to you for that thing.
26:48.5 A lot of people are saying, you know, economics, people are not buying what I have. No, they've seen it already because there's nothing new that's coming.
27:43.4 I also think that there's a huge opportunity for wholesaling right now. Like, I think if you have the money, the capital, the like leftover money, like if you're a business that's doing half a million a year and you have good profit and you have some good design ideas. 10 to 15 grand into some wholesale styles and trying to flip them in the next.
29:50.5 I think, and I hope that in boutique land, it continues to be about the full price, new, exciting stuff, because I do think that there is the misconception that people love and they love. I would argue totally differently that there are plenty of people that love. new, fresh, shiny items that no one's seen before.
31:50.7 Wanting to do smaller concept stores like a boutique and neighborhood shop, right? And at the same time, I think there has to be the learnings from boutiques and, you know, smaller retail. You also need to be looking at big retail and seeing what they're doing wrong right now and what they're doing right and what trends are jumping on.
33:24.4 I think Main Street has more opportunity than ever right now. It's wild. We came out of the pandemic. The pandemic changed everything, by the way.
34:50.2 always compare it to um, I always say It's a cruise ship or it's a sailboat, you know, a Macy's is a cruise ship. It is going to take a long time to like turn it around and get to the destination. There's a lot of moving parts and we're sailboats. We can change the sail and go the other way very quickly. So I think that's staying agile and staying small. And I think that's where You and I are always probably going to talk about like, keep your inventory tight, like keep your inventory in a place where you're not overbought.
35:50.9 what are your guidelines that you generally tell people about? Like sort of how much to their budget should they spend? And like, what do you feel like are good general guidelines? So it's going to change with each one of my clients, depending on where they are, depending on where their cash flow is.
35:50.9 fashion changes in six months, the fashion will change and customers are fickle.
37:32.1 always say, like, even right now, I could make you more money without more customers. Because the customers you have. Like you said, are telling you exactly what they want. And the difference is like, you're deciding to like, guess what they want next, instead of like using the information they've given you to make choices for the future.
40:04.3 Why wouldn't you reduce your fixture count on the floor and make you yourself look fuller with less inventory? Like, Oh my gosh, that's kind of like a weird brain fart for me. Like, wouldn't you somehow adapt your store layout to also fit your sales plan?
46:35.6 you know your person. That is the number one. Know your person, know why you're serving that person.
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