You can emphasize or weaken your fashion and selling messages by the way you hang and bin your merchandise.
Everything should be geared to your target customer - the amount of merchandise you show, the extent to which your arrangement encourages self-selection, the emphasis you give to new versus established fashions, and the prominence you give to price.
Setting Guide Lines
If you are taking over a department that has been run successfully by your predecessor, the present stock arrangement is probably sound, or at least has sound reasoning behind it.
You may see room for improvement, nevertheless. Proceed with caution at first, making sure that your changes are acceptable to your customers and not in conflict with your store's concept of the department. Listen to your salespeople, though you may not always do as they suggest.
Avoid sudden and radical change, just as you would avoid sharp change in the merchandise mix or sources of supply. Stock arrangement is part of merchandise presentation and merchandise presentation is part of image. Image can't be changed overnight.
If yours is a new department, or one that has been poorly handled by your predecessor, look for early guidelines by studying other, successful departments of your own store and departments similar to your own in other stores.
Your best guide is your customer and the impression you want to create upon her. How do you want her to consider your department — as a place for the newest of fashions, as a place for one-of-a-kind styles, as a value center? As a place where she can find almost any fashion, or as one that selects carefully the styles that are of interest to her?
If you keep your customer in mind, you can't go wrong. So, in analyzing the suggestions that follow, measure them up against your customer and your department's objectives.
No stock arrangement is infallible for every department. Choose what seems best for yours.
Your Stock of Featured Fashions
In your advertising and feature displays, you emphasize certain looks and styles as newsworthy.
You can emphasize them in the stock, too, by pulling them out of the regular racks or bins and setting them in a conspicuously placed rack or bin of their own, or a spotlighted area of the department specially decorated for the purpose.
In a high fashion department, whose customers seek individuality, you will want only one of a style on the featured-fashion rack or table. The rest of the supply is discreetly hidden in the stock or in the stock room.
In a department whose customers want widely accepted fashions, the presence of several similar styles in one place, or even in a mass display, is reassurance that a fashion is "in".
For instance, if you place three or four highly individual red dresses on a rack in the center of the floor, you are telling your high fashion customer, "Red is news". Cram that same rack with red dresses by the dozen, and you tell the cautious customer, "Red is well accepted. Everybody is wearing it".
Choose the method that suits your clientele, but try to have that featured-fashion rack, so that you can lead your customer from ad, to window, to interior display, to the rack from which she can make a selection.
Bins and Packages
It's a rare department that does not have some of its merchandise binned for self-selection. Usually, but not always, this merchandise is prepackaged. Bras, hosiery, blouses, underwear briefs, sweaters, and even dresses, have been sold to customers successfully in pack ages.
Unpackaged, binned merchandise requires constant straightening to keep it neat and orderly. Sales people should be taught how to fold the merchandise properly for binning. They should be reminded to use any pause in customer traffic to:
- refold rumpled items
- check that each piece is in its proper bin
- refill low and empty bins
- report any sizes or styles running low
- remove torn or soiled signs and ask for immediate replacements; ask replacements also for missing signs.
Packaged merchandise should always be shown with at least one garment open and available for inspection. Preferably, this should be on a form or T-stand to help the customer visualize it in use. The open sample should be replaced promptly if it becomes soiled.
If you permit salespeople to remove merchandise from packages in order to show it to customers, be sure they know how to fold and repack the goods.
Fixtures in which to show binned and packaged goods may be offered to you by merchandise resources. If store policy permits acceptance, make sure that they do not take more space or give more prominence to the line than you would otherwise give it.
The Parade of New Styles
Ideally, a fashion department should have something new each time a customer visits the store. As a practical matter, however, this may not always be possible.
If you can't have something new, look as if you have it. Here are some suggestions:
Change the feature displays and the "featured look" rack or table.
Even if you are still sponsoring the same fashion look, you can use different examples in the displays and on the special rack.
Change the sequence or emphasis of the colors, textures, lengths, etc., in your forward stock.
For instance, if you have your colors in sequence from lightest to darkest on your racks, change the pattern to, say, medium, dark, light.
Somewhat like rearranging the furniture in a room! Change the color or pattern of the garment you display near pack-aged or binned stock -the single shirt blouse that is opened up for examination near the neat piles of folded shirts; the few scarves that stream from the display loop above your counter; the sample bra near the packaged stock, for instance.
Change the accessories you use to dress up your featured garments; change the garment against which you show your featured accessories.
