Running Retail Advice by Jim Dion
Not Every Frog Is A Prince: Can You Recognize The Princes (And Princesses) And Lead Them To Success? – Part 5
We are concluding our series on Leading and Motivating Staff with the solutions to the Situational Leadership case studies introduced in Part 4. For those of you who are tuning in just now, here is a brief summary of what we covered in the previous i...
Not Every Frog Is A Prince: Can You Recognize The Princes (And Princesses) And Lead Them To Success? – Part 3
In Part 2 of our 5-Part Series on Leading and Motivating Staff, we talked more about Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and we introduced two Powerful Motivators – Affiliation and Achievement – and the combination of the two – Affiliative Achievers ...
Not Every Frog Is A Prince: Can You Recognize The Princes (And Princesses) And Lead Them To Success? – Part 2
In the first issue of our 5-Part Series on Leading and Motivating Staff, we started off our journey into the complex world of understanding people to manage and lead them more effectively with a definition of our job as managers or owners responsible...
What Gets Measured Gets Done – Metrics and their Impact on Your Business – Part 2
In my previous article (What Gets Measured Gets Done – Metrics and their Impact on Your Business – Part 1) I talked about the importance of measuring sales performance in a store in order to be able to assess what is working and what is not working a...
What Gets Measured Gets Done –Metrics and their Impact on Your Business – Part 1
In our consulting practice we work with various retail companies and what we have discovered over the years is that while some companies have incredibly sophisticated measurement systems to analyze their businesses and to ensure that what they are do...
Are All markdowns Evil?
Markdowns are most retailers’ biggest nightmare, whether you are a small independent running store or a chain operation. You know that they are a necessary evil – particularly at this time of the year - but the key factor here is how ‘evil’ should we...
Merchandise Budgeting and Planning
How To Make Sense of the Complex Process
As a retailer, planning your stock levels and assortments is one of the most complex and vital functions of your job. My goal is not to make you an expert on this complex function but to provide you with an understanding of the process of merchandise...
Merchandise Planning
This is the last article of our series on Merchandise Budgeting & Planning and the many tasks that this function entails
We started by learning how to conduct a complete Market Analysis to learn about our target customer’s profile and preferences and our direct and indirect competitors’ strengths and weakness. We talked about how knowing what the customer wants and...
Merchandise Planning: Part 3 of a Series
Sourcing, shoeline building and assortment planning are critical components that are sometimes taken for granted
Sourcing Sourcing is about choosing the right channels for buying the right product. There are various channels you may use. Here are the main ones: 〉 Direct – factory. If you purchase direct from the factory you can influence the desig...
Merchandise Budgeting and Planning
How to make sense of the complex process
This article is the first of a series. As a retailer, planning your stock levels and assortments is one of the most complex and vital functions of your job. My goal is not to make you an expert on this complex function, but to provide you wit...
Merchandise Planning: Part 2 of a Series
SALES AND STOCK PLANNING – WHERE IT ALL BEGINS!
The actual Merchandise Budgeting and Planning process begins with an estimate of the volume of business – dollars and items sales – that your store/s is/are going to produce in the next six months or year. Sales forecasting is the most critical compo...
THE CHOSEN FEW
Finding The Right People To Work For You
Finding the right people to work for us has always been and will always be one of the biggest challenges facing managers and business owners. Some of the changes that have occurred since Gen-X’ers and the early Gen-Y’ers joined the workforce have com...
Hiring and Retailing Staff Part II
This is the second part of a two-part series on hiring and retaining quality staffers. This week’s installment focuses on the interview and selection process. SELECTION Selection is the process of deciding which recruits should be hired. Selectio...
Management: How to Deal With Returns
When Product Behaves Like A Bad Lunch
There are few things that are more disconcerting for retailers than returns. We spend a lot of money to sell a product and when that product is returned it almost adds insult to injury. I would suggest however, that not all returns are the same, som...
Beyond Traffic Counting to Customer Service Analysis
If you were to ask most specialty retailers if they gave great service, they would look at you and say, “Of course, that is what we are known for!” Yet, if asked if they can quantify this, in other words, prove it, they often cannot. I believe that y...
|
|
Please Visit Our Sponsors
|
