A friend of mine rented a satellite store in a nice mall and asked me to help her set it up. While I was there I found the pricing to be quite good, and it had a good variety of high end stores. So I rented the store next to her and placed my advertising slideviewer with some sample merchandise. My friend asked if I could make the viewer larger, thinking it looked a little lost in the space. I felt a little foolish for not having thought of that, then enlarged it. It was much better. So, the lesson is to use your social contacts for business. I found a place and improved my presentation all because of one visit with a friend. I quickly went over to the other shopping center I’m using and enlarged the viewer there. Here’s a pic of the new store:
Later I was talking to a friend about events. She makes heavy use of the events schedule as her main method of advertising. I quickly realized this could be my replacement for classified ads. I will of course need some kind of event such as a grand opening, free item, etc. I think the grand opening makes sense, but I may start with the freebie. Instead of offering it in a prominent location like most stores do, I want to make it more like a scavenger hunt, without being too involved. I think I will just advertise something like “find the item with the red star, that item will be free”. Then they will have to move through the store as they search for the freebie.
I’m not seeing a change in my low attendance numbers at the store at this point. If this continues, I’ll consider my slideviewer a failure, but will probably keep the locations and just place actual merchandise, with a notecard giver to the main store and gallery.
