SALE SALE SELL

This past weekend was a big one for a small town in South Jersey. SHOP, a small retail boutique, located in Haddon Township had it's first and only sale of the year. I grew up in Haddon Township; it's a small community with one main street we call Haddon Ave. My family has our pasta company there and there are some more businesses ranging from hair dressers to a crossfit gym, a jeweler and a coal-fired pizza place. Over the years, if Haddon Township residents wanted to shop boutique style they would have to venture into Haddonfield (one town over) or Cherry Hill. The boutiques in both of these towns are expensive with most product ranging from $50-500. SHOP opened up in May with a new concept to the people of the town: "Outfits under $100."
Because I was working at Nordstrom at the time and living in Cinnaminson, I didn't catch onto this store until the end of September. I was told by my aunt to check it out because it was "right up your alley and I could totally see you doing something like this one day." I went in and was very surprised at the product that she had and how accurate her three word mission statement was. The clothes are appropriate yet fun and flirty; there is product for the young college girl who wants to be stylish and the moms who are tired of drab and want to be fashion forward. I shopped at SHOP for about a month (going in once or even twice a week) before being offered a job by the owner, Heather. It was a very difficult decision to leave Nordstrom but in the end it was the right choice for me because now I am allowed to be a stylist at much more convenient hours for my school schedule and I am learning the in's and out's of running a small boutique.
Heather decided she wanted to run one sale a year, after the holiday returns were brought back, with the entire store 30% off. That sale was Saturday. With her prices already being so good (jeans ranging from $50-70, tops $20-48, jackets $70-88) our customers couldn't wait to clean out. We brought out the two rolling racks of summer product we had left and instead of outfitting the store like we normally do, we categorized it by type of garment. On Friday we received our first big shipment of our transitional pieces. It was four rolling racks worth of product and we had to decide what we wanted to do. Do we put the product out at full price? Or do we keep it in the back and reveal all new product on Monday? Our customers must be able to smell the boxes because a few regulars came in and started asking when we would get new product. Since we had two of our best customers in the store we decided to bring out the new product, but we kept it in the back by the fitting rooms that was it was clear that it was not part of the sale. Ultimately, that was 100% the right decision to make. Once we brought out the new product, we did and inventory count and closed up for the night, eager to see what the next day would bring.

8 a.m. on Saturday morning we get to SHOP to give the store one final good clean and make sure we were all prepared for what was going to come, good or bad. Heather had her daughter come in to help us ring up so that she and I could focus on selling and greeting (and of course pouring the champagne because we never have a party without it!). Our average day in January has been $600, we would like for that number to increase, but January is always a bit slower in retail. I was hoping to reach $5,000 for the sale. It's 9 a.m. and we are open and there is no one at the door. We got extremely nervous. But! By 9:10 we had about 3 customers in the store and the sale went full swing from there. We had our customers come in rushes. For about 30-40 minutes it would be swamped and then we would slow down for 10-15 before picking back up again. I had worked Nordstroms half-yearly and anniversary sale but this was different, our customers still wanted to be styled instead of just grabbing what they could and running out the door. It made the day a little more hectic, but that is our job and we love what we do. We usually are open from 10am-5pm but for the sale our hours were 9am-8pm. Our last customer walked out our doors around 5:40 and we realized why we close at 5.
Around 1 I had a few minutes to go into the back and count how much money we had run on the credit card machine. I was pleasantly surprised to see we had done $2,600. I was so excited that I whispered what we had done to my boss and told her to bump my bet on $5,000 to $7,000 since we were still so busy. When we did the final count at night, our credit sales totaled $4,400 and our cash was around $800. We sold a range of sale product and a lot of full price product too (Thank goodness we decided to put that out! Our customers felt it was exclusive to them to get the first preview). We did hit my original goal, but we didn't make our stretch. Because we still had a decent amount of sale product, we decided to keep the store as is and run our sale through Wednesday. The sale was a great experience for me as a design and merchandising student. I was able to see how to merchandise for it, how to goal, how to run it, and how to take what you did at the end of the day and plan to apply that for the following year. We had a great day, our customers were so excited about what they got, and it was an excellent learning opportunity.