Are you missing this one critical thing that

I see so many boutique owners overlook when they're starting their business. Stay tuned. I want to help you because I'm just kind of sick of seeing this. So let's just cut it off the table.

Let's just lay it out on the table and let me tell you why this thing that you're overlooking might actually be the most obvious thing that you need to do.

If this is your first time tuning into my channel, hi, I'm Emily Benson. I'm a retail strategist, consultant and author of many books about boutiques, including this one called the ultimate boutique handbook. And I love helping boutiques start, grow and scale. And over the past 20 years, this is what I've done. I've been in the retail industry, working for big companies and now helping small businesses. And the more and more I work with small businesses,

The more I realize that the passion that people have for starting a boutique business often overshadows this big thing that they need to be doing.

You see, boutiques aren't just something that started yesterday. They're not something that your friends started during COVID. They're not something that an MLM like Lularoe decided was new and fun. No, no, no, no. Boutiques have been around for a very, very long time. The thing is, is that they've morphed and they've adapted and they've changed over time because the method of production and how we sell and man, just the internet in general has really shifted how consumers shop and

We know that 70 % of women are consumers. No. We know that women are 70 % of the consumer base in the United States. So obviously, boutiques are a great way to have women shop and they love it. But here's the thing. So many boutiques are starting because the owner loves clothes. The owner worked at a boutique. The owner worked in a retail business before. That

But what I see far too many new boutique owners and actually experienced boutique owners overlooking is strategy. Like that seems so silly. That seems so simple for me to say, but truly like a lot of people are out here just saying like, well, I wanted to start a boutique. So I went and bought some clothes and I put them online and I've been showing up on social media and like, I don't know. It's just nothing selling. It's not working. I don't know why.

Well, where was the strategy behind that? Like, where did you sit and decide what your retail price structure was going to be? You know, who are your competitive stores? Who else do your people shop at? And don't just say Amazon because like, that's not true. Okay. I don't shop at Amazon for clothes. I never have. I never will. I just I don't want to. Okay.

When you have a strategy with your boutique business, you are actually able to grow and scale it effectively because here's what happens, okay? Let me just back up, right? You're a new boutique owner. You go to market, you go on fair, whatever you're doing to buy inventory, you just go and you buy inventory. It comes in and you like put the prices on it. You're like, well, Emily said to mark up three times. So I'm gonna just like, 10 times three, that's the retail price.

And that's the whole strategy. All of that is backwards, okay? All of it is backwards. If you're brand new, what I need you to do is realize that we have to start with who your ideal customer is and what that product storeman looks like for them. What are they gonna buy? Most likely, they're gonna be buying tops, dresses, and bottoms, if they're a woman. If you have a children's store, most likely, you're gonna be selling jammies, sets, and...

we see like a lot of dresses as well in children's boutiques. There are core categories that a niche of a boutique will sell best. That said, you need to start with that plan. You have to say, okay, I know that my women love tops, dresses, and bottoms. Well, what percentage of sales will tops be? 40%. What percentage will dresses be? 20%. What percentage will bottoms be? 30%. 25%.

Let's make it up, right? We wanted to equal 100, right? And that's where we take our budget. Let's say it's $1,000. And we say, okay, with $1,000, 40 % of that is $400. So I'm going to go and spend $400 on tops. What does the top makeup look like? Let's break it down even more. Long sleeve tops, short sleeve tops. Are we selling sweaters? Are we selling, I wouldn't put jackets in here. They have to be real tops. Are they blouses? Are they dressy blouses? Are they work blouses? Where is your ideal client shopping? Like what is she shopping for?

Nope, slow down.

What is your ideal client shopping for? That's going to drive what you purchase. And then here's the thing. You can go to market with that plan and say, okay, I'm going to spend $400 on tops. And I know my person wants dressy tops and she wants a couple of basic tops. Fine. What are the price points for those? And when you say, well, like, what do they cost? No, no, no, not what do they cost? What are you going to charge for them? That comes before understanding how much they cost because

If you don't know what your person will pay for them, then we don't know what we should go source, right? When people go and source inventory first and then turn around and price it and try to make it fit into like what they want their store to look like, it never works. Like it never works. Most of the time when people come to me, I'm renovating their whole product assortment. saying, wait, wait, you just went out and bought whatever you wanted. You have so much unsold inventory. You have no strategy for this unsold inventory. Stop, we gotta just.

Draw a line in the sand, start with a plan. And then when we have a plan, once it sells, we can understand what the data looks like after. Remember in science class when you had to have a theory, said, okay, I think that this ball is gonna float in the water. That's what I think is gonna happen. We're not saying, I think this is what's gonna happen in my boutique. This is what's gonna sell in my boutique. So many of you guys are not thinking that. You're just thinking like, what do I like?

We have to be scientific about this. We have to be data analysts, okay? If you love math, you love numbers, you'll love retail. Because it's all math and numbers. And if you don't, it's easy math and numbers I'll teach you, okay? Don't worry about it. But I'm being for real. If you start with a plan and you say, this is our game plan, it's just like a sports game. Every sports game you're scouting, have the, you know, every coach knows what the other team might throw at them. So they're gonna say, all right, we're gonna play a zone defense.

We're gonna go hard to the left because they're weaker on that side and we're gonna try to, I don't know, we're gonna try to take out their best player. We're gonna have our best player guard their best player, right? There's a strategy. That's what I'm saying you need for your boutique, okay? Like no one shows up to a soccer game and thinks like, we're just gonna play, like let's see what happens, you know? No, like that doesn't win games, like right? Like even the best players still need a strategy. They still need direction. They still need to be coached, okay?

The fact that you don't have a strategy for your buying plan is a huge miss. It's a huge miss. And what happens is most people are starting their businesses with a small amount of cash, right? Or maybe a credit card. When you don't have a strategy, you go buy stuff and then you try to sell it and it doesn't sell or doesn't like sell the way that you wanted to. Then what happens is you have to go buy a new inventory, digging yourself farther into debt.

Again, you go out without a plan, you come back, it doesn't sell. Or some of it sells, some of it doesn't, right? Does this sound like you? Tell me in the comments below, does this sound like you? And again, no shame, I hear this every single day and I'm trying to get in front of it by making this kind of content so that you understand, A, you're not alone, B, there's a way out, and C, I can help you, right? I want to help you. That's the goal of all of this is for me to say to you, hey,

I'm really good at inventory planning. I'm really good at understanding what's going on in people's boutique businesses. Come work with me. Come let me help you, right? Because like maybe you don't have that professional experience. Maybe you are too in your head or you are too worried about things. You need a second perspective.

So the thing that you're overlooking is having a plan to buy inventory, okay? So yes, it's strategy, but I would say even more niche down, it's having that plan because inventory is the only way to make more money. I was just talking about this with a client yesterday. She said, well, Emily, how would I increase my sales, right? Like I would have more people come into my store. I would sell more items or I would raise my price.

Right? That's how you make more money. Either more people come through the door so you just have more traffic. You sell more stuff, which is like, yes, we hope you sell more stuff to those more people coming in. Those are kind of hand in hand. But also you could charge more. Like you could raise your prices on a bunch of things and you'll just naturally make more money. Not that's not a perfect plan. I'll be honest with you. But that is like theoretically the way to make more money. What I want to encourage you to do is take a step back.

Okay, especially if you're at the beginning of a season or you're finding this video at the beginning of a year, I want you to take a step back and I want you to look at what you've sold already or look at what hasn't sold. And I want you to really be honest with yourself and say, what would my strategy be going forward? What have I learned or what do I know about my customer? And honestly, maybe you haven't sold a lot. Maybe you've missed the mark a lot and you're just like, I just...

I think I need to blow this thing up and restart. Yeah, you should, good. Like honestly, having a boutique business is about pivoting a lot. It's about learning what you like and what you don't. And it's about developing the plan, whether that's for a month, a quarter or a year, developing that plan so that you can test and experiment off of it. So when you create that plan upfront, you're able to then, once it sells or it doesn't, come back and say, like, were we right, right?

A plan is a really educated guesstimate. And in retail, there's a couple factors, like there's your average retail price, there's your percent of sales, there's your, you know, there's a couple different things you want to look at to understand how to build a plan, then go buy a plan, and then let the plan play out. Again, I was just, I've been doing a lot of planning and a lot of bi-plan development with some of my clients. And I said, you know, like you are where you are now, but.

everything that we're doing going forward, the plan is to basically sell out of everything or sell down to the piece of everything because we're planning it so perfectly. We have all this sales history. We have all this data about what we know has sold in the past and we're using that to base it on the plan for the future. So even though she's come to me now, like two years into her business, this client, she does have leftover inventory. She says, she's like, I have stuff from two years ago. Okay, that's fine. Like we can deal with that now.

My goal though is for anything that you place an order on in the future, we know exactly how much you're buying, how much we expected to sell and that we expected to sell through. So you don't have a sale rack anymore. You don't have to do a bunch of markdowns. Like if you're listening to this, you're watching this and you have a ton of stuff that's like on sale, not selling, sitting in a basement, whatever, you didn't buy it correctly. Genuinely. I've again had people say to me, well, but my traffic was down.

Yeah, but you can still work around that, you know, so the biggest thing you're overlooking is having a strategy. Hopefully in this video, I've walked you through some things you haven't thought of to develop that strategy, develop a plan. But if you are looking for more help, I'm of course here and you can always email me or comment below. I love to talk to you guys. I love to know I'm a real person and I'm developing all this content so that we can have thriving boutiques in the US because

It is still going really well for so many of my clients and I can't wait to have more boutique start and more boutiques grow and scale and, you know, keep going. I've been doing this for 10 years, helping boutique owners start growing scale. Like I said, started with my book and the success I'm seeing, the freedom, the money I have women making. It's just incredible and I want you to be there too. So hopefully this is giving you some good insight. Please feel free to reach out if you need any more help.

And thanks for watching like and subscribe to my channel and I'll see you on the next one. Okay. Bye

Hoo!