Building the Boutique

Q: I want to open a boutique that carries all kinds of jeans. It’s really hard trying to get a hold of vendor (seven, tr, etc) NO one has called me back or emailed me. Can you please help me out with any tips. When I go to these trade shows are those vendors there?

A: First off, that sounds like an awesome idea for a boutique. Really, really awesome. Secondly (and more importantly), who have you been contacting, exactly? Are you contacting corporate or some name you found on their official website? You have to make sure you’re contacting their showroom/sales rep. Check the LA Fashion District Lines directory to make sure you’re calling the right place (if you’re on the east coast, just give them a call and ask who reps the line over there). If youre not getting through via email, keep calling and calling. Eventually, someone at the showroom HAS to answer. And of course, whether you’re talking on the phone or via email make sure you sound professional, like you know what you’re doing, and use the right lingo.

From my experience, those lines don’t show at trade shows (probably because theyre so big that they’re closed for distribution in a lot of areas and don’t really need to bring in new buyers, I’m guessing). I rarely see any denim lines, actually, except a couple no one has heard of. And Ive never seen True Religion or Seven or Citizens at D&A or Brighte or any of the shows here in LA, but I’m guessing they do show at MAGIC. If you can’t make it to MAGIC you’ll need to go straight to their showroom, and usually during market week it’s deemed “okay” to do so.

Funny story though, the last time I was at market week we pass the showroom for either Seven jeans (Im pretty sure it was them, if not True Religion), and I’ll admit it was pretty daunting. They had a receptionist that you had to pass through before you could enter into the actual showroom, which is something Ive never seen before!

Okay, maybe that’s not helpful, but the point is you always have to try, try, try. If you get a no, ask why and then make changes. I’ve gotten a number of lines that were “closed for online distribution” because I fought for them a little bit. And one of the reasons why Im revamping my website is to open a few doors that were closed for me early on. So best of luck to you, and wish me good luck as well!

More questions? Follow up questions? Hit me up in the comments section of this post, via email or anonymously via formspring!

After going over a couple of different ecommerce hosts for the past 2 weeks, I made up my mind and signed up with Volusion earlier today. Yeah, I know, a couple of you warned me about them, and I really do appreciate your input. I really wasn’t 100% happy with any of the potential hosts I looked at. But the whole bandwidth/downtime issue was the only thing holding me off when it comes to Volusion ….whereas I had a whole number of issues with Shopify and CoreCommerce. Although I did have a pretty bad experience with their support people on live chat last night (one basically refused to answer my questions and purposefully LEFT the chat right in the middle of our conversation, and the other told me to import my products by hand and didn’t see it necessary to let me know there was a feature already installed to do it). Not such a great impression, unfortunately.

But otherwise, I’m really excited about Volusion though, mainly because I’ll be saving money. At Yahoo! I was paying $130/mo (plus transaction fees). On Volusion I’ll be paying $40/mo. No, you didn’t read that wrong, I’ll be paying less than a third of what I did before. It really makes me wonder how Yahoo even stays in business these days. At this point they’re technically ripping off their customers.

Within the next ten days or so I’ll be sprucing the site up and getting it ready before I change the domain servers over, so for the time being OohLaLuxe.com will be completely accessible, and there shouldn’t be much downtime. But man is there SO much to do, and so many little things. It really takes a lot of time to get a store set up, but it will save me so much time in the long run.

Hey guys, I’m behind on the form spring questions by about a week. Sorry about that. On top of everything I’ve been trying to do recently, I’ve been sick since last Thursday and I haven’t been to work since then (except to mail out a couple of things). I don’t even know what I would be doing right now if I weren’t in a salon and if I were the only employee at my shop! Anyways, I’ll start catching up tonight. If you have a question or just want to read the answers, check it out here.