- Are your fashions in step with what your customers are ready to accept? Too early? Too late?
- Have you chatted with sales people and department managers about customer reaction to the merchandise? Have you made any personal observations of customers on the selling floor?
- Have you told the fashion story adequately in your promotion? In display? In the way your stock is arranged?
- Do your sales people know the fashion story of their merchandise? The value story? Have you equipped them with selling sentences? With ideas about coordinating your merchandise with appropriate apparel and accessories for the current fashion looks? What are your best-selling classifications? Price lines? Style numbers? Do they indicate a common factor that you should exploit in future purchases, displays, promotions?
- Are your sizes, colors, prices, balanced against demand? Have you let some of your fast sellers run out of stock? What do your want slips tell you?
- Have some potentially good sellers been crowded out of sight?
- Ignored in display? Neglected in your presentations to sales people?
- Do your sales people need your friendly encouragement to try just a little harder? Can you bring a manufacturer's representative, a fashion editor, the store's fashion coordinator, into the department to address a sales meeting?
- ? Is your department clean, fresh, and inviting? Your fitting rooms?
- Is your department understaffed and missing sales? Or overstaffed with people too bored to sell effectively? Or staffed with people who have little rapport with your target customers?
- Have you shown your merchandise to sales people in related departments? Offered it on loan for displays in other departments?
- Have you checked competing stores to see where you or they are weak?
- Can you discuss with other buyers — those in your store and those from non-competing stores whom you meet in the market-ideas for improving the sale of merchandise like yours?
- Have you checked the fashion magazines and the fashion features of general magazines for ideas you can adopt or adapt?
- Have you analyzed the reasons customers gave for returning merchandise?
- Have you analyzed the returns themselves, to see if any style, price, or resource is producing more returns than others?
- Conversely, have you strengthened your assortment in areas that produce very few returns and presumably give complete satisfaction to customers?
- Have you analyzed the complaints which reach the adjustment desk to see if there are some just causes of returns that you can eliminate in future purchases?
- Have you recently reviewed with your sales people the business of how to measure and fit customers accurately? Of what styles to suggest to customers of various types?
- Do some of your sales people push too hard for sales, without regard to fit, becomingness, and customer satisfaction?
- Are there some special cautions about the merchandise, such as washing instructions, that you have not adequately explained to sales people, and that they in turn have not adequately explained to customers?
- Have you been inviting mail and telephone orders for goods that require personal visits and try-ons?
- ? Are your sales people encouraging customers to buy merchandise over the counter when the goods require try-ons? (Such as, for example, new lengths in slips, new styles in bras.)
The causes and cures for both are similar. Improved sales are first aid for both conditions, but to get at the root of the trouble, ask yourself:
- Do you know which subdivisions of your stock produce the best and worst turnover figures? Which ones are most or least out of line with planned inventory? Are there common factors you can use to guide future purchases?
- Have you pruned your stock of the slowest moving styles, groups, price lines, colors, sizes, etc.? Built up those in greater demand?
- Could you have improved your timing by bringing some goods in earlier or later than you did?
- Have you been buying individual items and numbers in over-large quantities? Are there good resources from whom you can buy in smaller amounts, more frequently, and closer to your time of need?
- If you have branches, have you been selecting merchandise without sufficient regard to the variations in fashion demand among their several communities?
- Is some of your trouble the result of not being able to say "no" to resources whose hospitality in the market was better than their fashion sense this season?
- Have you been stampeded into buying too much, too early, because of baseless fear of scarcity, rising prices, runaway demand, or other threatened emergencies that never came to pass?
- Have you postponed needed markdowns?
- Have you some numbers among your slower sellers that need only a little better presentation to make them sell?
- Have you resold your sales people on good numbers that came into stock too early? Sales people tend to become bored with styles that have been on hand for a time even though the merchandise is still eminently salable.
- Have you sought a common characteristic among your slower sellers as an indication of where you may have misjudged customer demand? Does it suggest any warnings to observe in future planning?
