Small Things Make a Big Impression

In this short piece I will walk you through a small experiment that I did in my store over the last few months. This article will, I am sure, get you to start thinking differently about the small things in your business and about how revisiting things that you have taken for granted can yield some spectacular results.

I own a clothing store; my clients cover the full spectrum of shoppers. I have a men’s and women’s section as well as a section for boys and girls. Since the economy started to weaken over the last number of years I have seen a corresponding decline in sales. No one will disagree that it is not a good time for business, but I knew that if was to stay in business I would have to figure out a way to get people to take a second look at my products.

This sounds like a simple enough challenge but I assure you it is not. I was not comfortable with taking out a loan to invest in a big advertising campaign plus getting people into the sort was not my problem it was getting them to actually buy things that was really eating me up. So I decided to reexamine what I already had at my disposal to reinvent my store. I was not sure at the time what that would consist of but I knew I had to try.

So I looked around the store one day after work and waited for some kind of inspiration. Then it hit me! I saw my mannequins all lined up against the wall. They were positioned like that for as long as the store has been opened and I never once occurred to me to rearrange their positioning. It was such a breakthrough that I wanted to hit myself in the head. Don’t get the wrong idea, I changed what they were wearing a few times a month but I never thought that I should reposition them.

So what do you think I did, I moved them to much smarter locations and grouped a few of them together in strategically places. After a few hours of messing around with them my store looked completely different. I was so happy.

To make a long story short I saw a definite rise in sales within the next month. Granted it was not a tremendous increase but it was noticeable. It wasn’t the moving of the mannequins that did it I was the reevaluation of something that I took for granted that gave me the edge.