How to protect your profit as a retail brand
Life as an independent retail business isn’t easy. Whether it’s the ongoing impact of Brexit, changing market conditions, rising rates, National Insurance Contributions or something else, running a small business is ever more expensive.
Sadly, we can’t change any of those factors (if we could you know we would), but we can help you to protect – and boost – your profitability without adding to your employee costs.
That’s because we provide fractional merchandising services to brands. The merchandising bit makes your business more profitable. And the fractional bit means you can access experienced merchandising expertise, if you don’t already have it, without the ‘on costs’ of having to employ us.
Fancy a closer look at the detail?
Photo by Stephanie Belton
Merchandising makes your business more profitable
Essentially, we’re the number crunchers who work out how you can boost sales, increase your profit, manage stock levels, optimise your cash flow and more. You might think that sounds dry and/or complicated, but to us, it’s a joy!
Here are just a few of the ways we can help make your business more profitable:
· Plan a range your customers will love
· Price your products for profit
· Predict how much stock you’ll need, with a little help from forecasting
· Use markdown and reductions to maximise sales and protect your profits
· Make wholesale work for you
But what you don’t need is for all this merchandising work to create an extra burden on your team and your budgets. That’s why…
Investing in fractional support just makes sense
Fractional support is a great option to consider when you’re looking to supplement or make the most of your in-house merchandising capabilities. Our team members all have many years of experience at a senior level, so hiring any of us full time would be pretty expensive. But work with us fractionally and you get our decades of experience and expertise at a cost that’s closer to hiring a more junior member of staff.
We don’t come with any employee ‘on costs’, and you don't need to worry about training or supervising us. We’ll just hit the ground running and integrate into your business.
Drawing on our decades of experience and using the merchandising skills we’ve honed over the years, we’ll help drive your brand forward. We’ll make sure you have the reporting tools you need, and support you with the cycle of planning, trading and forecasting through the seasons. And if there are any gaps in your skillset, we can run bespoke training that’s tailored to you.
Our work with Zoe at Kiddiwhizz is a great example of this. In her case, we focused on supporting her with sales forecasting and stock management, to make sure she could keep up with the demand generated in the aftermath of her appearance on Dragon’s Den.
There are lots of ways we can fit into your business, whatever its size. Let’s take a look at the three most common ways we might work with you.
You don’t have in-house merchandising support
If you don’t already have an in-house merchandising team, we can act as your merchandisers. We’ll put a structure in place, carry out the work itself and help you grow until you're ready to recruit.
You’re preparing to fill an in-house merchandising role
If you’ve found someone you’d like to fill that role, we can put a structure in place and then help train your hire(s) to carry out the work, sharing decades of experience with them. And if you haven’t yet recruited to the role, we can help with that, too.
You already have an in-house merchandising team
If you already have a team in place, we can help move them forward. This is especially important if there’s nobody in your business with experience at a Head of Merchandising level. We’ll fill that gap so they can learn and grow from us.
Times are tough, but your brand can still flourish
With the right merchandising support, you can optimise your cashflow and boost your profits. And by being smart in the way you invest in that support, you can maximise the return you get for your pennies.
If you’d like to have a chat about how our flexible, high-level expertise could help your brand, get in touch.
