Building the Boutique

Holiday season is off to a great start; much better than I expected. I’m so glad I decided to do presales , it not only brought in sales quickly but it helped me make a lot of buying decisions for Spring 2009. With the success I’ve had with Love Quotes and Lauren Conrad in just a short time (and with no paid advertisement), it really showed me how much easier it is to sell well known brands and especially celebrity endorsed brands. That was probably the biggest reason why I decided to take on some of the labels I purchased for Spring, but the downside is I feel like I’m losing the initial vision I had for the boutique. I was always a bit more interested in unique, unknown labels. It’s such a double edged sword!

Delivery Delays
So, my Love Quotes holiday delivery still isn’t in (although it probably will be tonight, if not tomorrow). The delivery window was October 1st – 15th but the company moved their warehouse and didn’t have certain colors in, so deliveries were delayed for every boutique. It’s been pretty stressful for me sense I have about a dozen preorders just waiting to be sent out, so once these are in I’ll be so relieved!

I have a couple of colors that are already sold out. Some of the newer ones like Bordeaux and Deep Teal have been fast sellers. The only one that has sold much slower than I expected is Cobalt. Probably the fact that it’s an older color has something to do with it, but this was supposed to be one of the hottest colors of the season!

Sometimes it’s better to trust your instincts…
Like I mentioned before, the Lauren Conrad line is doing really well for me. And it’s funny because the fastest selling piece by far, the Ashlee Dress, is one I initially passed on. Why? Well, the sales rep told me neither she or any of the other buyers cared for the dress and that she hadn’t sold it to ANYONE in my territory. So of course, this worried me and I decided to go with this purple draped asymmetrical dress instead. After thinking about it for a while I changed my mind and decided to go out on a limb. I was felling so daring that I ordered it in red instead of the safe color, black. The decision definitely paid off, which shows sometimes it’s better to take a risk! And I still appreciate the sales rep warning me, she definitely meant well. I kind of wish I had chosen riskier colors for some of the other garments I purchased, but oh well, too late now.

Fit Troubles
Here’s another problem I’m experiencing for the first time. I’ve never seen so many all over the place sizes. On one hand I have Bryce & Bouji which runs two or three sizes large (seriously, the size XS in a few of the pieces can fit like a 6 or even an 8 ) and then in a couple of the Lauren Conrad styles there was barely a difference between in size between XS, S and M (very odd) so I ended up sending a couple of the sizes back. So that just goes to show why it’s so important to try on EVERY item that you get and give fit instructions based on that. It’s not a bad idea to measure out the other sizes as well.

Tomorrow I have an interview on a college radio station. Wish me luck that I don’t stutter.

Let me take a minute to just breathe here. The last week has been SO hectic! Now understand that my days are usually very quiet, but I’ve been busy, busy, busy for about the last eight days. I did my product photography and of course that shoot for DuJour magazine that I mentioned, and I ended up having to go back and do reshoots a few days later because we didn’t exactly get the whole set up right. I’m also helping my photographer build her website and I did my first in home consultation yesterday which went well and was a lot of fun!

Fall/Holiday sales for Love Quotes and Lauren Conrad are doing better than I expected. The merchandise hasn’t even arrived yet but the pre-sales are pretty popular. I’ve only got one left in the Bordeaux and Deep Teal Love Quotes colors, and if you’re looking for Moonbeam (white), well I can’t be much of a help there.

It was only about a month and a half ago that I went to market week for the Holiday/Resort collections, and I JUST realized that the Spring 2009 market is just around the corner! This coming weekend, actually. Well that completely snuck up on me. So, I’m heading down to LA on Saturday and I’ll be buying from at least two labels that will be new to the store; both are well known, and one is VERY popular. Feel free to guess

It drives me crazy how quickly this industry moves, though. In real life it’s barely starting to get cool again, but in the fashion world we’re worried about next Spring. Crazyness. I’ve looked over most of the linesheets and so far nothing has really grabbed me. I’m sure I’ll like things more in person but I think Fall/Holiday/Winter is just more exciting for fashion in general. Actually, this time last year was the first time I went to a showroom, so this kind of marks one year of being “in the fashion industry”; yet another sign that time moves ridiculously fast.

So, between now and Saturday I’ll be obsessing over line sheets, going back through the Spring fashion shows and studying the Pantone predictives. Wish me luck at the market!

By far the most confusing thing I’ve run into in the process of running my online boutique has been shipping.   There are just so many options, and so many hidden costs.  This week I found that out the hard way.  Let me start at the beginning…

I had planned on shipping with UPS from the beginning, since they always provide tracking, insurance, the whole nine yards.  It also doesn’t hurt that there is a UPS place about four blocks from where I live, making it extremely convenient for me to drop off these packages daily.  So I went there before the shop was even open and they told me about getting an account with UPS.com, saying I would get discounts on my fees.  Yes, DISCOUNTS.  Of course, I said sign me!  Oh how little I really knew….

So I used this account for all my shipping for the first couple of weeks.  Everything was so easy with it!  I would just fill out the slips at home, take the packages in and it would take them about two seconds to ship it off for me.  Each label had really short and easy to read tracking numbers already printed on the too. Just to be sure of the costs, I asked the girl at the counter how much it would be, and she gave me the price, but said it could be “a little more or a little less” using an account.  Okaaaay. The thing is, on UPS.com you have to get a separate login via snail mail before you can even see how much you’re being billed.  Kind of ridiculous, huh?  So basically, I had no way of tracking exactly how much I was being charged at this point for my packages.

This is where things started to go wrong…

The next week I finally get an invoice from UPS.com.  My mouth literally dropped open when I saw the total. It turns out they’ve been charging me nearly THREE TIMES the amount  it would cost for me to ship without an account for each package!  That’s triple the price, plus they charged me an extra $10 fee for a mistake that was made at the shipping center.    It turns out that it actually costs about $5 to use the shipping labels they gave me down at the UPS place, plus a bunch of ridiculous extra fuel and residential charges, on top of absurdly high prices to begin with.

But was I made aware of any of this at the shipping center, when they were pushing this account on me?  Nope.  When I asked them about it later their excue was “we don’t know nothing about that”.  The grammar in that sentence pretty much says it all.  Maybe it’s just me but it seems rather sensible to keep your employees up to date with what’s going on at the corporate levels.  I mean, God forbid they have the ability to actually ANSWER customer questions and keep their customers fully informed!

Thankfully I was able to get some of the charges removed.  I’m still pretty upset about the whole situation, considering how irresponsible this company is at a corporate and at a franchise level.   I’m no longer using the account.  The only downside now is that it takes a bit longer to ring up each package and the tracking ID’s are considerably longer, but they’re small prices to pay for saving a huge chunk of money. It turns out that even when you do ask as an exhaustive amount of questions, it doesn’t always help.

 Okay, I’m sure you’ve all enjoyed checking out the new products on OohLaLuxe.com (right? right!), but don’t think I’m going to forget what we’re all really here for!  Building the boutique is a never ending process.   I actually did my 3rd photoshoot last weekend, and my last for a while here….and for that I’m thankful.  Photoshoots just aren’t fun. Why?  Too much lifting!  I love the styling aspect but I hate having to take up that heavy mannequin and dress it.  It’s good excersize, though.  Thankfully this one was only about an hour with seven looks or so.

New Section – FAQs
You might notice the “FAQs” button at the top of the page.  This is my way of making the site easier to navigate.  So if anyone has questions that have already been answered in older posts, you can look up there and quickly find the particular post without having to wade through months and months of posts.  But its a work in progress!

Speaking of questions, a couple of weeks ago I received an email  from Latasha with a thorough set of questions about launching a boutique.  It’s basically a quick over view of a lot of things I discussed early on, but this is great for anyone who has just found this site, so check it out:

Q&A

How much do you know to order (inventory) for an online boutique, vs a actual boutique where you may have 3 of the same shirts where as online you have way more customer since you are online?
Well first off, I didn’t assume that I was going to have more customers.  When you think about it it’s more likely that you’ll have less customers because there’s no walk in traffic; you have to build your customer base from the ground up and you’re competing against EVERY online boutique, not just the ones in your town or in your area.  There’s really no set amount on how much to order.  I bought 1 or 2 in each size, and the only reason why I bought two in some sizes was because of the minimums on some lines.  I personally think it’s good to start small and not get in over your head, so I wouldn’t recommend taking in more than two pieces per size.

I know you are housing the merchandise yourself, did you ever think about letting a fulfillment house your merchandise? And with you housing the merchandise, how are you going about with shipping, packaging and that sort, are you going thru usps, fedx??

I don’t even know what a fulfillment house is!  People keep mentioning this but I’ve honestly never heard of it before.  I’ll have to look into it, but I highly doubt there’s one in my town anyways.  But I like having my things right here where I can access them in case a customer has a question about fit or if I need to do reshoots or something like that.  Plus, I’m guessing it’s cheaper and I need to save as much as I can!  I’m using UPS and USPS for international orders.

Did you ever email any of the sales reps asking to carry their lines, and if so, how did your go about asking them (what is key info to ask)?
I did, I emailed tons of them.  Just tell them what you can about your business and ask for their line sheets.  Usually they want to know where you’re located and what other brands you’re carrying.  If the line is really high end they might want to know more.  In this case you will probably need (I forget what it’s called exactly…) sort of like a press/media kit?  It would most likely be a PDF with information about your store, floor plans, square footage and a ton of other stuff. Unfortunately I don’t know too much about this since my store isn’t brick and mortar (yet )

Did you create any contracts and agreements for the reps or designers?
Not beyond the invoices, which only allows you to cancel an order up to 7 days after it’s place (I think; it might be 10 days, can’t remember exactly).

I know a lot of people say when starting out start out small and what not, but with starting out do you think its best to have a business lawyer and a business consultant, pr/marketing firm?
If you can afford those things I would say go for it.  I would KILL to be able to afford pr/marketing!  If you can only pick one out of those three, I would say go with that one.  And if you can, try and find someone you know to help with these things for free.  My dad runs a business totally unrelated to fashion, but he was still able to help me a lot with the paper work in the beginning (and the fact that he’s in financial services doesn’t hurt!) and I have a friend in PR who helped me with a press release.

How are you promoting your site??
Through advertisement!   This is the only thing I’m trying to keep hush hush, but it’s not that hard to figure out.  Online advertisement, basically.

When paying the sales reps are you doing cod or paying up front, credit??
They take my credit card at the show room and then they charge the card when it ships.  Usually they will call you to confirm the card before the ship date.

At the showroom/tradeshow, when you find the lines you want and the pieces do you have to pay up front?
No, you don’t have to. They give you a choice.  You can also do COD, or credit like I did.  I believe they take checks as well.

When you do decide on the lines you want to carry, how long is it until you receive the merchandise  Or does that depends on you and when you need the merchandise or when the site will be up and running?

Good question!   Right now the lines are showing their Fall 2 and Holiday collections to buyers; buying for Fall 1 (usually August & September) ended in April, so that gives you an idea of how far in advance buying is.  But sometimes, depending on the line, you can order immediates and have them shipped right away.  They’re basically left overs.  Voom, for example, is great with this.

And each season is broken up into two or three delivery dates, usually one per month.  So if I’m the sales rep for OLL and you’re looking to buy for this fall, there will be a different collection for October (shipping 10/15), November (shipping 11/15) and December (shipping 12/15).  That’s just an example, sometimes the ship dates are the 1st or 30th of the month.  More flexible lines will let you push back items from one shipment to a later one in order to meet their minimums. So there are ways to customize your deliveries, to a certain extent.

 So, what’s next? Hopefully buying for Fall and Spring in the coming months! I can’t wait for holiday sales, that should be a fun time.  And more importantly I can’t wait to get into the showrooms again.  Buying is seriously my favorite part of this process.  I’m looking at a handful of up and coming lines, and I’ll probably add one more well known line.

I can’t WAIT for you guys to see what Voom and Plastic Island have for Fall!!

This post is very delayed, and I’ll explain why later, but first I want to give a HUGE thank you to everyone who has supported me on this blog from the beginning, and thanks for all the compliments on the opening of OohLaLuxe.com.

Getting the Store Up & Running For the past two weeks I’ve been pretty much working on getting the site up, day and night. I’ve really had the worst luck with computers/internet recently. For about the last three weeks it’s been one problem after another! First I my internet would only work for a few hours a day, and after that was fixed my computer was attacked by spyware/trojans. It took me almost three days to clean that out and THEN my internet starts going at a snails pace (think slower than AOL…yeah). Le sigh; perfect timing, eh? It just slowed down my progress, but it didn’t stop me!

So I basically had to build the site from scratch, by hand, from the ground up. I’m pretty proud of doing it all myself, although it was terribly time consuming and a ton of work. I had Natasha of Riot Designs create the header image for me, but everything else I pretty much did myself. Yahoo Web Stores is pretty cool to work with, it’s not too limiting although there are a few things I would tweak about the system if I could. What’s great is that they make it fairly easy to customize the look of your site, as long as you know how to use Dreamweaver and design web pages before hand. But at the same time, that meant creating each and every page by hand. But thankfully the bulk of the work is over now!

Next it’s all about marketing. I’m probably going to start with word of mouth and then advertising, and then later try and get some PR locally or something like that. I really hope you guys continue reading this blog. I’m still going to document the process of running a boutique, because it’s really just getting started! And I hope to launch a brick and mortar store in a year or two, so of course I’ll cover that as well when I get there. Wish me luck guys!

Yesterday I did my first photoshoot for all of my merchandise. The whole shoot took close to 3 hours, and we shot about 18 pieces from the front, back, full length and some detail and side shots. It was hard work but fun work, ultimately! Doing a shoot is a lot more strenuous than you would probably imagine. That mannequin is a ton of fun to work with (hence my sarcasm).

I still have a few things I need to reshoot but it’s looking good for the most part. Now all that’s left to do is put the finishing touches on the site itself!

Here’s a quick preview of the outcome:

My photographer described the Jae Basilio Cynthia Kangaroo Tank ($88) as something Kate Hudson would wear, and I think she had a really good point there! This is one of my absolute favorites from all the pieces I bought. It’s just sexy, care free and fun, and absolutely perfect for summer! I would probably wear it over grey leggings with flat sandals during the day and then dress it up with a pair of peep toe pumps and bare legs for some kind of beach party.

And we also came up with a nice detail shot for the Voom Gray Luxe Baby Doll Dress ($196) that I previewed a few weeks ago here. Click the pic to see it in full!

My mannequin drama ended last week. I found this company, Joslin Display who got a pretty silver headless female sent out to me in almost no time, while just about every other online retailer said I would’ve had to wait a week or two longer. I’m really glad I made the decision to go silver, but I sure wish mannequins weren’t so scrawny. Do those even count as thighs??

So this weekend is my first photoshoot, and I have a feeling it’s going to be an all day thing with about twenty pieces to shoot, front, back and detail shots to take. I still can’t give an approximate date as to when the site will be open. But as long as there aren’t any technical snafu’s, it should be very soon.

Fall Drama
Oh boy, I’m so disappointed with so many of the Fall collections I’ve seen so far! There were a few lines I had my eye on, and I absolutely loved what they did for Spring/Summer, but everything just fell apart after that! I guess some designers are just better doing short, bright colored, sassy clothing, which makes a bit of sense.

But thankfully, my favorite line always comes through and I’m highly impressed with what they have for Fall. It’s really tough having to place an order for 7 months from now when you’re not even sure what kind of return you’ll see before then! But I’m hoping to place at least a small one, and then hope to get in on some immediates when Fall actually comes around. Here’s the catch though….I only have until next week to make a decision!