At the recent NW Buyers meeting in Minneapolis, specialty store owners on a panel moderated by MR’s Stu Nifoussi were asked to discuss store promotions that had been successful for them. Here are their responses. Comment on these or relate your own experience in our Successful Promotions MRketplace forum. Click here to go there now.
Greg Kreuger – St. Clair’s for Men, Owatonna, MN
I just completed one of the most successful promotions in our history. We ran a Leap Year day sale. We hyped it the week before with 2”x 6” ads in the local paper saying “Watch Thursday’s paper for the largest one-day Leap Year day sale in town,” and not even mentioning the store name. We closed the store Wednesday night and papered the windows with 29% off all over. We ran a big ad in the paper saying that the doors open at 7am. We took merchandise that was already marked down 50-75% and added another 29% discount so we were almost giving it away, which is what we probably would have had to do anyway. We closed the store Thursday to set up for it, and to hype it even more. At 7am Friday morning there was a crowd outside waiting for the doors to open and, when the first guy through the door spent over $1000, I said to my salesmen, “It’s gonna be a good day.” And it was amazing. People had fun. We gave them a sheet when they walked through the door showing how to calculate the discounts. They really enjoyed figuring the prices and seeing how ridiculous they were. And I have to tell you, we sold a lot of regular clothing that day. It was really something.
Tuxedos are a great way to get young people into the store. We get in touch with the “after prom” party committee, not the school, and they give us a list of the graduating students that the school doesn’t give out. We offer basically $3 per tuxedo rented for their after prom event. These committees are really clamoring to get their kids in the door because they can get an extra $500-$600 for their event. Now we have about 6 towns around us that work with us each year.
The other nice things about it is that you get young guys and girls in the store who might have thought your store was a little “dorky” from the outside, but once they get inside they say realize that you have a lot of fresh stuff.
The other thing we have found to be successful in our town is to contact the human resource directors of the companies around the area. Their job is to sell the community to employees that are transferring in. We’re 70 miles from Minneapolis, and 30-40 miles from other big towns. Chances are a lot of those people are still listening to Minneapolis radio stations and they’re very hard to get to. They might not even have a land line phone. But when these companies bring in a new employee, our store is one of the first local businesses they hear about.
David Rubin – Joseph’s, San Antonio, TX
Okay, I’m marking that leap year idea on my calendar for 2012. We’re in San Antonio where it’s warmer, and we try to clear out our winter merchandise in January. We send out a lot of mailings, something every couple of weeks. But one thing that has been extremely successful for us is that every February we have a Valentine’s Day mailing, in which we offer $14 off to every customer that they can spend on anything in the store, except socks and underwear. If someone wants to buy a $19 clearance shirt for $5, that’s okay. Our average sale from it is about $145 and we feel that’s pretty good. We usually try to get a 10x return on what you’re spending and we generally get that and more.
John Stern – Straus Clothing, Fargo, ND
Each year we do a winter sidewalk sale that gets us a lot of local and national publicity, because it’s pretty cold in Fargo in the winter. Also, my dad was 94 this summer, so when we did our summer anniversary sale, we said that anyone who’s 94 or over can get a suit from us for $94, and it’s not a cheap suit poly-rayon suit either. It’s a nice S. Cohen suit, and that was good for business and good publicity.
We’ve also started targeting our customer better. For instance, with our St. Croix trunk show, in the past we spent a lot on mailings and advertising it in the local paper. This year, we sent mailers only to our St. Croix customers, which we pulled from our computer, and followed up with a phone call. We did 50% more business than we did the old way.
Tina Popp – John Cicco’s Menswear, Merrillville, IN
I think our best promotion is our annual “Beat the Dealer” mailing. We send a big postcard, based on blackjack, which says “The dealer has seventeen.” The customer comes in and competes against the dealer and if they get 17 or more, they get a percentage off, which can go as high as 40% for blackjack. It’s very expensive to mail out… we send about 12,000 postcards… but we’ve been doing it for about 15 years and it’s really effective. It’s so refreshing to see people walking through the door and it’s sticking out of their back pocket or in their jacket, or they tell you they forgot it at home. This year, our cost was about $5,000 but it generated about $60,000 in sales over a month and a half.
Peter Rose – Chelsea The Men’s Store, Wyandotte, MI
One of the things we do is the creation of events that are not just about selling clothes. We make people feel welcome in our store. We’ve been carrying Tommy Bahama for a long time and we had our 12th annual “Island Paradise” party last June, just before Father’s Day. We served fruit and finger foods, plus rum and wine, and created an island atmosphere in the store. Our customers really appreciate it, and they did eat the food and drink the wine. The advantage that we have over the big stores is that we know just about all of our customers by name, and we do ask them to participate in our social events, and they will.
Bob Missel – Sampter’s, Fremont, NE
A couple of years ago we did a “Going out for your business” sale. We papered the windows for a week ahead of time, promoted in the local paper, closed the store for three days, and, when we reopened we did an amazing amount of business in a few days. Unfortunately, we paid for it a little in the following month, but it was worth it because we moved a lot of product and had a lot of fun.
Brian Kaufman – Kaufman’s, Great Falls, MT
We did a Ladies Night on a Monday before Thanksgiving. We sent to 500 of our best female customers or spouses, pulled from our computer. On the piece, we also included other local retailers so, for instance, the home goods shop that sells wine was tasting holiday wines and if you wanted to order some you could do it right there. It was 20% off from 4-7pm, and we were supposed to dress in tuxedos but I never got to put mine on because it was so crowded early and for the next 4 ½ hours. In fact, I didn’t leave until 8. We had 60 ladies come in from 500 pieces mailed, and it was the first cold snap of the year with snow.
The other thing I did that was very successful was to switch most of my advertising from print to TV. I never talked about prices, only focused on product. For instance, my father always called our navy blue hopsack blazer the “dumb coat” because you could get dressed in the dark and it always looked good. So, we did a 15 second commercial on the “dumb coat” and we increased our sales of it by 30% over last season. We did spots on 7 different pieces and all but one showed an increase in sales.