By Ali Cudby
Summer presents many opportunities for retailers to upsell accessories to customers, particularly for wearing under a sundress, the wardrobe staple of summer.
Here are three items you may not think of, but are summer sundress essentials for every woman’s wardrobe:
Seamless Underwear
Fabrics can be clingy, and the last thing a woman wants is the dreaded VPL – Visible Panty Lines. VPL will ruin the look of … Read More
By Ali Cudby
Everyone knows the three most important rules about retail real estate – Location, location, location.
In today’s retail environment, a business’s location means much more than just its address. In fact, a business may not have a physical address at all.
Every lingerie business, whether bricks-and-mortar or virtual, has a footprint for communicating with its customers. The deeper, the better in a retail world in which more … Read More
By Ali Cudby
Has anyone else noticed that there has been a lot of focus on tween and teen bras lately? It all started with the media flurry over a new company called Yellowberry.
Yellowberry is a company that’s gotten a lot of press. It’s a crowd source-financed bra company founded by teenager Megan Grassell. It all started when Grassell took her 13-year old sister bra shopping for the first … Read More
By Ali Cudby
Recently, at The Intimate Circle, I spoke to Moira Nelson about the elements of manufacturing retailers should understand in order to buy and sell more effectively.
Like a retail store, a lingerie manufacturer must convey a clear message about their brand. Particularly at a start-up, which is where Nelson’s Bra La Mode focuses its consulting efforts, it’s critical for a company … Read More
By Ali Cudby
Since joining the lingerie industry, I’ve always gone to the Curve trade shows in the US, but I hadn’t managed to visit ILS, the International Lingerie Show – until now. I wasn’t sure what to expect from my maiden voyage to ILS. I was told it was the “sexier” side of the lingerie industry, and that I would see more adult toys than I knew existed.
When … Read More
By Ali Cudby
A lingerie retail store – either bricks-and-mortar or online – is customer service oriented by definition. If you don’t make your customers happy, they won’t come back. Without customers, you’ll find yourself out of business. Seems obvious.
So retailers want to please their customers. But what happens when the thing that works best for the business is directly opposite to what the customer wants? That gets challenging. … Read More
By Ali Cudby
In the first part of this Buying Strategy series, we talked about the philosophy of creating a store’s Open to Buy.
To review, an Open To Buy calculation allows your store to map incoming inventory against expected sales. It is important to begin by thinking through your inventory across the main product verticals, such as bras, bottoms, shapewear, etc. Once those basic categories are determined, you can … Read More