Are you dreaming of opening a boutique in 2025? Great. I'm excited that you're here. My name is Emily Benson. I am a consultant for boutique owners and women's clothing sellers. And I am ready to tell you the step-by-step guide and why I think 2025 is going to be different for a lot of reasons. So stay tuned.

All right, so let's talk about what it means to launch a boutique and do it successfully. I'm sure you've seen all over the internet things like drop shipping, e-commerce, what else? Start a Shopify store, sell things on Etsy. There are so many resources out there right now. I wanna try to simplify this for you, okay?

I have been working in women's boutiques in retail for 20 plus years. And at this point, I've kind of seen it all. And I have a very strong perspective on what you should and shouldn't do. I think the landscape has changed drastically just even since COVID. And I think there's so many things that are potentially coming up if you're based in the US that we have to consider. So I'm going to go through all of that today. And at the end, I'm going to give you the big, big like here's what you need to do. So stay tuned until that.

So stay tuned until the end.

So my first bit of advice is probably something you weren't expecting to hear. And actually, I think that's good because I know you've been looking at other videos on YouTube and they're saying, get in the IED number, register on this website, start buying inventory. No way. Stop right there. Like, you cannot do anything in the boutique world that I call boutique. No, I'm going to call boutique land. These days, you really can't do much inside a boutique land.

without being aware of the landscape that already exists. Like you think you have a great idea, you think you're gonna help women and you're gonna change the face of things, you are, but there's already a lot of people out there doing it, okay? So the biggest piece of advice I can give you just as you're starting out is to have a unique perspective or what I would like to call a strong point of view.

If you've ever listened to any of my content before, I talk about this a lot because honestly, a lot of us are seeing the same things over and over and over. I was on TikTok shop the other day scrolling through my TikTok and I'm seeing this long sweater, black plaid with bright colors in it. Guys, I've seen that for three years. I'm over it. Like that was all over TikTok shop last year. How is it back again? Like I am sick of it. Now that said, it doesn't mean that there aren't customers that don't have that yet or there aren't people that

Haven't seen that style and it's a great style. I get it. That said, you have to understand women's boutique shoppers, even children's boutique shoppers are very savvy. They know what's going on. They know what's out there. And if you don't have a really strong point of view, you know exactly who you're selling to, then it's gonna be tough for you.

I think that one of the biggest worries that most boutique owners have is, is this oversaturated? Is the marketplace too competitive? Well, I want to tell you a story about one of my clients. She had such a strong point of view. She loves check prints. She loves smiley faces. She got into aliens. Her whole thing was having a lot of fun, being really niche, and catering to this creative, fierce, wild woman who

just couldn't find what she wanted to sell on the market. So she started as a boutique sourcing products from markets and from LA. And then over time, as she grew the brand and grew the image of the brand, the voice of the brand, the look of the brand, she was able to start making her own goods and shipping them in. Now, to make your own goods, it is about 120 units that you'll need to buy. So for everyone starting out, that might not be your path. But you can absolutely buy inventory

and then work to the point where you're making your own. But what the core of this is, is the brand. What she was selling, you couldn't find anywhere else. The way she was taking pictures of it, the way she was styling it, it was so unique and it was so eye-catching that on Instagram in the feed, you're scrolling, scrolling, whoa, it really stands out. You have to be like that too. And I hate to say it, but there's a lot of boring stuff out there right now. And especially if you're going to be online only,

You have to have a brand that connects with other people that like you find your tribe and that they want to go so far as some of these customers of my client who had this wild brand. They would have their family photo shoots themed around this brand. I saw one person have a small wedding themed around the brand. Now that didn't mean that like she bought everything, but it was, you know, the motifs, the ideas, the

the imagery that was used in this brand she used in her wedding. Like that's insane, but also that's it. That's branding, right? And so if you don't have a strong point of view, if you are not artistic, if you are not creative, if you are not thinking slightly outside the box and in a way of trend, it's just gonna be hard for you, especially online.

Let's talk more about online because social media has easily become a shady breath.

Let's talk about what it looks like to be online right now. Whether you're gonna do drop shipping, Etsy, you're gonna make your own stuff, or you're going to do a brick and mortar store. It doesn't matter. You have to be on social media. You have to be on Instagram. You have to be on Facebook. And I would say at this point, you should be on TikTok. You should be on Pinterest. You should maybe even be on LinkedIn and YouTube. You've gotta be out there. And I'm gonna be honest, like it has to be your face.

You have to try harder. Most people that I see that struggle in boutique land, it's because they can't get that social media piece of it right. They can't figure out their photography. They're too afraid to put their face out there. And frankly, like they're just not giving their all. And, you know, I struggled with this myself. If you follow me or you follow me for a while, I might look really confident. I might look like I don't second guess everything I say, but I do. It's really hard to show up here and give.

information, give advice, just film. It's hard to do it. And so just know I'm out here doing it. You can too. Okay. I am definitely not confident about everything. I definitely have makeup on. I definitely work with my lighting, right? There are things you can do to help yourself. But at the end of the day, if you're not confident and you're not willing to show up, then it's going to be really hard, especially if you're going to be only online. Okay. Now, if you're going to open a brick and mortar,

Yes, you still need to show up, you still need to do a lot more, but there are certain other things that you want to focus on. You want to focus on your Google reviews. You want to focus on where that location is, doing your windows really well, getting your name out in the local community, right? And some of that is going to take showing up on social media, you know? I need to take a break.

So what creates a great social media post? Great photography. Can you get out of your stairwell? Can you get out of your guest bedroom? I'm in an office in my house, but I've really tried hard to make it look interesting, make it look different. There's a reason the background is blue, because I know it's going to stand out on social media. I know it's going to stand out on YouTube. And so for me, that was an important distinction that I painted that wall behind me, painted all the walls around me, right?

You can do that too. You have to put some energy and effort into that. Whether you are online or again in brick and mortar, if you're in a brick and mortar, you're still gonna need a clear background, an easy space for you to take photos. And you might even have to go out in the world and take some photos like on location, you know? It doesn't mean you have to rent a place and be fancy, but you do need to get out into the world and take what are known as lifestyle or editorial photos to include that in your social media.

I might be getting too detailed here, but I'd like to give you this advice right now. If you are going to start a boutique in 2025.

I want you to commit to one year of showing up at least every other day on social media or every single day. You have to. That first year of your business, not that it's make or break, but it's definitely like, let's get the momentum and the energy going off the bat because realistically, we want to sustain you for a couple years, right? You're just starting out. You're not even thinking, am I going to be open in five years? I can tell if you're going to be open in five years.

based on what you do your first year. And now I know some of you guys are doing this as a side hustle or at night or in between other things. I get that. I was in that spot too when I first started my boutique. was nannying during the day. I was refereeing volleyball games at night. And then I was running my mobile boutique on the weekends and then other nights where I wasn't refereeing. I mean, I was working all the time. That said, that little mobile boutique was a six-figure boutique pretty quickly.

I was able to ramp up really quickly, get a lot of press, get myself out there. And yeah, I was young. I had not a lot going on, but I did. I was working. I had to like support myself while I started my boutique business. And I think that there's not enough people who talk about really how hard this stage of it is. When you start out, it is the most exciting, the most interesting, and absolutely the loneliest and the hardest that you'll probably ever feel.

Because not everyone starts a business. Not everyone has it within them to want to do that or to even follow through, OK? So you're in rare air over here. And I think I want you to remember that the work you put in now will pay off. It has to. It has to. So many people are like, I've been open for two weeks and I haven't made a sale. OK, it's only two weeks. Keep going. You have to keep going.

The people that end up not being successful, and I'm gonna say this about every business, most of them just quit or they run out of cash because they grow too quick or they make poor planning decisions, right? If we plan from right now for you to be open in three years, what does the next three years look like? Well, first stage is I wanna get you to one to $3,000 months consistently, right? $3,000 months is a great benchmark to get to as quick as possible.

then we raise the bar, then we go to 5K months, 10K months, and hopefully we get you up to where some of my clients are, where they're doing 60K months, 70K months, right? That's where we want you to be, but you have to start with just getting yourself out there. The more you show up, the more traffic you'll get to your website or into your store, and then the more people that show up, the more people will buy. It's really just a numbers game, and so it's just volume of how many people you need coming to your website or coming through the door.

is going to affect how many people buy. Most people are not gonna buy something the first time they see a post, period, end of story. They wanna see you over and over and over and over to build that trust, okay? So that's what I'm saying. You gotta put that year in, keep going, and once you do it, it just gets easier. It does. It sounds silly, but it took me a lot less time to set up my camera today than it did a year ago.

Okay, I wanna ask you right now, what are you struggling with most when it comes to starting your boutique in 2025? I wanna hear it, I wanna know. Post down in the comments below because I wanna help you. If you haven't noticed here on my channel, I answer every single person back. I don't think there's one unread comment on any of my videos because we want to help you. That is why I'm here. I say we, my team, but please comment below what you're struggling with so we can help you.

And if you know.

If you like what I'm saying and your plan is to start a boutique, please subscribe to the channel as well. This is the only content I put out. It's all about how to start, grow, and scale your boutique business, whether it's children's, women's, gifts, men, whatever it is, I can help you. So stay here and don't forget to hit that button to subscribe.

Okay, so Emily, you've been in the industry for a really long time. You've seen things come and go. Like what happens over the course of 20 years? What do you think is gonna happen in 2025? Well, let me tell you something. I have seen the rise of brick and mortar stores over the past couple of years. We thought COVID was gonna move everything online. Honestly, all it did was bring everyone back offline and want them to shop in stores. My brick and mortars are doing amazing. So if that's something that you wanna do, I want you to think of a couple things.

So if you wanna open a brick and mortar, there's a few really important things that you wanna think about. One is what state are you in? If you're in the United States, there is going to be a clear division between where brick and mortar stores are going to work and be affordable and actually make you money and where they're not. Where they are is going to be an economically healthy states, California, Massachusetts, New York, Illinois. I still think Texas will be okay.

There are certain states that if you're gonna open a brick and mortar store there, it's gonna do well for sure. I would say even narrowing in on certain cities, certain towns, and then the location. The closer to a grocery store you can be, the better. The closer to where people are naturally going to a restaurant is going to be better. Are those rents gonna be higher? Yeah, they definitely are. But you're going to have so much more exposure. The people that are...

in a destination location or they have a store behind their house or they're more rural, it's just gonna be harder to get people out to where you are, right? They have to make another stop to go there. So if you're in a situation where you find a place that looks like a great location, but it scares you, that price scares you, like $5,000 a month scares you, but you're like, man, this location's amazing. Do the math.

Okay, so the thing with brick and mortars, you really have to consider a location. It might be more expensive to exist in a place that has more natural traffic, but you're going to save money on advertising. You're going to save the headache of having to teach people where your store is. They're just going to say, look at that cute store. I want to go in and shop, right? So thinking about brick and mortar, I really truly believe that brick and mortars will continue to grow over the next couple of years.

Yes, is online huge? Yeah, but there is just the shift back to shopping local, being local. And honestly, like I know we see a lot of local businesses going out of business. I will say that like my clients are doing great. I have like so many of them that are meeting last year sales or exceeding last year sales and the future looks bright. The one thing we do have to worry about here in the United States, I will say, is the conversation around tariffs. Now,

If you don't know what tariffs are, they're an import tax that we pay here in the US when goods are imported from other countries. Every single country has a different import rate. And even within certain countries, depending on what you're importing, you can get different tariffs depending on the material that you're making it out of, the industry you're in, it's all over the place. But what our new president-elect has said is that he intends to put tariffs on China, an additional 10%.

and then 25 % on Mexico and Canada. Now, how will that affect us in boutique land? Well, number one, a lot of our stuff comes from China. A lot of our stuff comes from Mexico. Mexico is one of the largest importers of things like graphic teas. And no, that's not true. Hold on.

Mexico is a huge place where knitwear is made. So if you're buying sweatshirts and sweatpants, like that could often come from Mexico. So to have a 25 % tariff on it is huge. That means that instead of paying like $10 for something, you're paying $12 and 50 cents, which automatically gets passed on to the customer. So a couple of things about tariffs that I want you to consider is like, number one, don't get nervous about it. Like it hasn't gone into law yet.

The second thing that I would say could help us in terms of tariffs is the competition or is sort of the saturation of the marketplace with these cheap sellers from Tmoo and Shien. These are big companies that come from Asia and they're kind of ruining like cheap and cheerful fashion for us. The thing is, that when things are shipped from China, if they're under $600, the parcel, it doesn't have a tariff on it. So Tmoo and Shien are selling

clothes at a really cheap price and our customers in the United States are paying very little so they're not seeing that tariff on it. Now if that tariff ends up going on to all goods from China or all clothing from China, it could technically help boutique owners because what it means is that those Shien and Tmoo prices will inevitably have to go up and they'll hopefully lose some of their customers. That said, I don't want you to worry about Tmoo and Shien. They're absolutely not necessarily your competition.

I have been encouraging everyone and anyone to, again, have unique style, find those pieces that are more interesting, that are not cheap and cheerful and gonna fall apart in two seconds, right? Part of the global fashion community has been looking at sustainability and what does our planet have to pay for us to have new clothes all the time? Now, in no way am I saying that boutique owners are climate polluters.

They are to a certain extent, but we're not the biggest part of the problem. Now if sustainability or if, know, honestly, if you're looking to bring a new revenue stream into an existing boutique business, I love consignment. Like I absolutely love resale. I love the idea that, you know, something that's really good and can be worn multiple times gets passed on to someone else at a great price. You get to make money off of it. Consignment is a really cool model. And what we've seen actually in reports and

If you go into business of fashion or women's wear daily, you'll see articles that talk about how consignment is blowing up online, right? We have places like ThreadUp and even Poshmark, right? Resale is exploding online. It's not profitable from a company perspective, though. It takes far too much work to bring in the goods, photograph them, shoot them, ship them back out. What does work, though, is a local consignment store.

in an area that they can support the local economy. They have done studies. There is data to support that opening a local consignment store, if it's done well and you have things that people in your area want, is actually highly profitable and can be a great business model. In fact, I have a friend who opened one consignment store, I think now 10 years ago, and I believe she has four locations now regionally. Like, she's killing it. And that's the thing is,

Consignment can live without tariffs. It helps the planet. It is sustainable. And when you find those consignment customers and you are a really good editor at what comes in and like you just don't put anything on the shelves, you really curate it to make it look like a boutique, it can really, really work. So that's another thing that you could consider going into 2025. I think two of the biggest trends are gonna be brick and mortar and consignment. Hopefully you'll do it in brick and mortar, but even if you just start on an app like Whatnot,

and decide that you want to make some sales on there with things you have in your closet, it's a great way to get your feet wet and start trying out what it looks like to sell things and to show up online.

Now, doesn't matter what you're gonna do, you need a plan. Like most of the time, I have people come to me a year into business, two years into business, three, and like it's a mess. Like it's just a mess. And it's not a mess that we can't clean up. And it's not a mess that we have to be ashamed of, okay? I wanna like take all that off the table if you're a client or if you're someone who's been with me a long time and you feel like, man, I'm not doing everything the way Emily says. Like it's okay. Businesses are always fixable.

But if you're here and you're just starting out, haven't bought a lick of inventory, you're in the best position because you can create a plan. Creating a plan is going to help you understand who that ideal customer is so you can build that brand around them. And by building that brand around them, you know exactly what products to buy. You know exactly how much to price them for. And it all fits together in this beautiful profit plan. And here's what I want you to know.

Emily Benson (35:55.027)

The people that come through my courses, the people that use the method that I teach you, which is a professional level retail curriculum, end up being more successful than people that don't have a plan. They end up being more profitable out the gate. They end up generally also making more revenue. We hear stories all the time. I'm three months into my store and I'm at 25,000 a month. I'm two months into my online store and it's, I'm at $5,000 a month.

Emily Benson (36:21.36)

These are numbers that you need to get to to be profitable. And if you don't have a plan in place on how you're going to get there, you're just planning to fail. Like you could go ahead and sell graphic design services. You could sell any service for any price for whatever. But that's not how it works with product based businesses. Product based businesses are incredibly reliant on the product assortment and the margin of that product.

Emily Benson (36:47.057)

And so if you are not good at picking out products, if you don't have a creative eye and maybe you're not in a position where you're the person that picks the coolest clothes from your friend group, this might not be for you actually, right? That said, if you love fashion, if you love kids' clothes, if you love talking to people, if you love selling, this is for you

In this video, I've given you so much, honestly. Like, this should be a lot for you to wrap your head around and say, I can do this. If you are feeling like you're like, yeah, let's go, what are the next steps? I wanna direct you to a mini course that I have called Boutique in a Week. It's seven days, and it's the seven most important things that you need to.

Emily Benson (38:30.704)

really launch this boutique with success, with profitability in mind from day one, you can break even faster than you think, you can build a business faster than you think, but it's always going to be with that plan. if you're looking to, so if you want more information about Boutique in a Week, all you have to do is comment week below and we'll send you the link. And we'll send you the link. thanks so much for watching and I'll see you on the next one.