Industry Insider: Five Tips For Making The Most of The Holiday Selling Season

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• November 17 2008
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Industry Insider is a new Transworld Business column featuring the views and opinions of, you guessed it, members of the action sports industry. If you’d like to share your thoughts, opinions, initiatives, or other industry related tidbits, drop us a line at business@transworld.net

BY KEN LEWIS

Ahhh…the holidays. Gifts, crowded malls, and shrinking profit margins. It’s the make or break time of year for hundreds of mom-and-pop retailers across the country. With chain stores and online retailers taking up market share, being a brick-and-morter specialty store isn’t so special these days. Now more than ever, shop owners need to retain their customer loyalty and find new ways to keep their business relevant.

With Thanksgiving and the Christmas rush fast approaching, here are a few ideas you can use to maximize your selling season.

1. Take advantage of your mailing list and website. Hopefully you got your flyers out early for your holiday sale. People love a deal and they love it even more when they feel like they got something more than a “regular” customer. Add an extra 10% off on some select items in your store that only your loyal customers qualify for.

2. Going into the holidays, hopefully you took advantage of your vendors’ discount offerings. It’s a great time of year to buy some off-price closeouts so you can build in some extra margin and have items on hand that you can get aggressive with to seal some deals and stoke out that cheap mom who is looking for that 40-percent-off product. As a side note: always make your customer aware that the huge discount stuff is final sale only. You don’t want that item coming back for store credit and have it take up space on your racks for the next 12 months.

3. Use and promote an in-store or online “Christmas Wish List.” It can be as simple as having a card catalog that’s alphabetically organized on your sales counter by the register. Have your shop kids fill out a card with their top 3 choices of what they want for Christmas. The kid then lets his parents know that he or she is registered at your store. You would be surprised at how many kids adjust and add to their list every day. The parents love this too, as it eliminates the guesswork and intimidating choices if they don’t know skateboarding very well.

4. My favorite thing I used to do was buy some of those cheap nylon mesh Christmas stockings, you know the ones that you can find nuts and crap in at the local mall? Anyway, I would buy a few dozen and fill them with bearings, bolts, grip, stickers, and key chains. Mostly stuff that I got off-price or that I wanted to blow out, and I’d sell it as a stocking stuffer kit. I was always surprised that more companies didn’t offer something like this every holiday. This makes for an efficient and fun add-on sale item.

5. Last but not least, try to offer something that the big guys cant. Great customer service!  In this crappy economy people want to feel good about where and who they give their money too. Make sure your employees are paying more attention to servicing the customer than to the cute shop girl who’s hanging out. Employees should be well versed and knowledgeable with all the product in the shop and they should be able to answer questions intelligently and in a timely fashion. Nobody likes to get one-word answers or feel like the employees are just too lazy to help them. You want to keep your customers, make sure your employees do, too.

Good luck and happy holidays!

Ken Lewis is the director of marketing for TransWorld SKATEboarding and a former skate shop owner.