2008 has been a rough year — how have you survived? What’s your secret to success?

2008 has been a rough year — how have you survived?

-- Kids Today, 10/1/2008 12:00:00 AM

Charmaine Roy, Hurwitz Mintz	Phil Wrzesinski, Toy House	Max Guerrera, Rattles & Rhymes

Charmaine Roy, Hurwitz Mintz

Good question — I can’t wait to read other answers to the slow, and I mean snail-crawling slow, retail year. To compensate for the slow period, we at Hurwitz Mintz increased and expanded our advertising. We have also made special purchases from vendors and are promoting very, very aggressively. With the special purchase ads we state 'no phone orders’ and this helps get the customer in the store, with the possibility of increasing the sale. For example, if we promote a bedroom suite, the sales associate has the opportunity to also sell bedding. We are also using extended, no-interest financing. We have not had to bring in any new vendors or categories thus far, but anything’s possible. Let’s just all hope that this rough period ends soon.

Gary Wiggs, Badcock Home & More

At Badcock we dug in and did not go outside the box. I kept it simple and easy for customers to understand. I also had some really good prices on groupings. I want to say, knock on wood, we grew through this period. They were small increases but I was going north and not south, which is incredible considering the financial economical times. As the election comes, we will do more direct mail advertising and continue to offer a good value at a fair price. Pre-market in High Point was busier than I expected. As we go forward I see us maintaining our approach in youth and having an optimistic view for continued sales increases.

Karen Scott, One Step Ahead

In late 2007, we modified our product portfolio to emphasize more on needs vs. wants and trimmed back on the higher ticket items. We have also increased the frequency of in-season promotion, using weekly emails to our customer base as the primary channel.

Lastly, we have improved the features of our baby registry and added two new departments: preemies and special needs (to launch this month). To date, we are holding even with prior year sales, and marginally exceeding plan.

Phil Wrzesinski, Toy House

We have chosen not to participate in any recessions or economic downturns. Specifically, we have not done anything different this year than we would do any year.

We continually search for new products, vendors and categories that fit into our store and can be profitable. This year, however, because many vendors played it close to the vest and did not offer much new at the recent ABC Show, we added more new vendors than usual to diversify our product mix. In fact, we ordered from eight new vendors at the show.

We have not cut advertising or marketing. If anything, we increased it slightly and strove to find better ways to spend our ad budget and market our business. But we have not resorted to discounting to draw traffic. Discounting only trains customers to wait for deals. Instead we have looked for ways to increase value in the products we sell, whether through better in-store experiences, increased staff training and knowledge, and/or smarter product selection. But again, these are steps we take every year, regardless of the economy.

All in all, we have continued our same aggressive approach to win the hearts of customers. And it works. While unemployment in our town hovers around 10%, our business has grown.

Max Guerrera, Rattles & Rhymes

I believe the secret to success in any economy is managing cash flow. We start the year with a 12-month plan. Each month we reevaluate the plan based on current business projections. If we are beating plan we buy more, if we are missing plan we buy less.

It is important to designate how much of your sales will go towards three factors: expenses, new merchandise and cash reserve.

In a tough market, we constantly evaluate our inventory levels. Sometimes it is necessary to run sales/promotions based on the amount of overstocked inventory. Cutting new product is never an option. The key is to identify old product that is not selling and liquidate that product in a timely manner. The distinction between a specialty store and a mass merchant is our ability to get new, innovative products in our stores first.

Jami Myers, Jami Bz

The ABC show was a fast and furious shopping experience (so glad I wore flats)! My main goal for the show was to find unique and affordable accessories. I was able to add new vendors to our assortment and was able to shop in a more effective way.

Now that the store is in its second year, I am more in tune with our customers’ wants and tastes so this show was just what we needed. As we all know, this was not the ideal year to start a new venture. But, we are in it for the long run and are learning to take one day at a time and simply be kind to the people that walk through our doors every day.

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