Biz tips 2020: prepping for the busy season

It’s been quite a year! And it’s not over yet – in fact, in terms of retail, it’s only just beginning. With Spring around the corner, the busy retail season comes with it, and now is the time to get to work behind the scenes to step up your pre-season prep. We thought we’d lighten the load a little with a bunch of biz tips, some ways to adapt your business during a pandemic, and how to visually refresh your stores to look their absolute best whether they’re a shopfront or online.

Riding out the pandemic

Between the bush fires and the Covid-19, all kinds of businesses have taken a hit. But if one positive has come of the numerous disasters of 2020, it’s an even keener urge by Australians to shop small, to support local, and to adapt. We saw a great number of our wholesalers adapt to a new world by moving online, introducing new business practices and products, and becoming involved in their communities. We can’t know where this second wave of Covid will take us this time, but we do know from the first wave, that those who came out the other side did at least one of these three things…

1. Get online Even if you can’t afford a website right now, consider selling via your Facebook group or one-on-one via Instagram messages. If your store is forced to shut, you want that back-up income an online store can provide. Look at Shopify or eBay for simple e-commerce starts, but whatever you do, just get on and work on making it perfect later.
2. Pivot your business What can you do to make your business relevant to the times? One way is to offer those essential products that are suddenly required. Our hat sales have not decreased at all during this pandemic because they’re a daily essential, but the addition of face masks was a timely one that was a success. Focus on those things people need, rather than things they might want right now. Masks have become a popular new product, as did hand sanitizer the first time around. Perhaps you can bring in more craft kits or jigsaw puzzles for families in isolation. Other ideas: start offering home delivery in your local area. Chat to neighbouring stores to share the delivery load or look to offer gift boxes with other local stores. Do you sell a lot of kids furniture and décor accessories and have a keen eye for design? Offer design services in your area – e-versions if you’re handy around Canva or photoshop. Think of new ways you can attract customers or sales.
3. Don’t disappear People are at home a lot more and are looking for things to learn and things to do – if you store is closed, how can you still be relevant to your audience? Teach them something, share behind the scenes, do some market research, talk them through some of the products you sell and show them what they do. If you’re the go-to place for gift boxes for baby showers or your gift wrapping is A+, shoot some videos or host a Zoom for customers to learn some simple ways to DIY. Show followers how you’re styling products in your home, what you’re kids are wearing (using your products) and some great ideas you stock to get them through isolation part 2.

Get yourself organised

Transform yourself into an admin queen and feel on top of things with these simple behind-the-scenes tweaks to give your customers the best info, product and customer service possible.

* Get to know your products Really know them – understand what they do, what they’re made of and be able to rattle off the unique selling features. Predict the best-sellers and keep an eye on trends so you can push your items that fit those trends if you have them. Know how to care for tricky items (for example, we recommend people use wash bags for our hats to avoid the chin straps tangling). Become the expert on whatever you’re selling because customers will ask you questions and you want to be able to point them in the right direction or make the right recommendation. With your wholesale order that you will receive shortly, we’ve included an A4 handbook with all you need to know about Bedhead’s products. We’ve got the info on styles, sizing, this season’s prints and the best-selling features of each of our three ranges – Originals, Swim and new Heritage. We’ve also included a magazine-style booklet on visual merchandising and how best to style our hats in your store on our hat stand, table-top hat stands, on shelves and flatlays. We hope it gives you some ideas! You can find a whole bunch more information about our products on our FAQ page, and our business ethos on our Ethics and Sustainability page. You might need to also acquaint yourself with our soon-to-be-uploaded videos on how to reverse the new Heritage hats on our product pages so you can show customers how it’s done.

* Order right Have you ordered the popular sizes and styles that are guaranteed sales? Find out what a brand’s best-sellers are and work around those. If you need a top-up of hats, in-season orders can be placed via our wholesale portal. At Bedhead our most popular sizes are:

Legionnaires: 42cm, 47cm, 50cm
Toddler Buckets: 52cm
Ponytail and Classic Buckets: 54cm

And our best-selling hats are usually solid colours! While our prints sell out fast, our core stock of plain-coloured and novelty hats sell well all year round – they go with everything, suit more people’s tastes and never go out of style.
Our most popular:
Blush
Grey
Denim and denim ruffle
White (especially in newborn legionnaire)
Chambray

* Keep on top of your stocktake We recommend – from personal experience! – to conduct regular stocktake of your products. Wrong counts often mean unhappy customers. Aside from the big yearly/half-yearly check, it’s ideal to double check stock in small batches every few weeks. Particularly if you have an online store and bricks and mortar business!

Visually improve your store – online or shopfront

A little bit of visual merchandising can do wonders for business. All it takes is one really great visual to draw someone into your store for more - then it’s up to your products, customer service and overall vibe of the store that converts them to buy. If you’re an online-only store, make each graphic on your site count. If you're a shop, do your best to make your products draw people in and display them in creative ways or in a way a potential customer could imagine them in their life. Many store visual merchandising ideas can also be adapted for flatlays and mini photoshoot sessions in your home to create great images for your social media accounts or website.

5 ways to make your web images work better for you

1. Keep your category page imagery uniformed for a better user experience For example, stick to either product shots or lifestyle shots rather than a mix of both. If you choose product shots for the category page, you can use the lifestyle images on the product pages. 
Tip: If using product shots remember to drop the background to white to help create a uniform look (Bedhead's product image backgrounds in your social media pack are dropped to white for you!).

2. File size matters! You need to strike a balance between quality and size. Smaller image file sizes help to keep your website load time down (ideally less than 3 seconds). If customers have to wait too long you're at risk of losing them. See how your site performs here To decrease the size of images, try these steps in Photoshop, using the “save for web” option and adjust:

Quality: Find this in the top right-hand corner
File format: Find this in the top, right-hand corner. We recommend .jpeg for product and lifestyle images.
Optimization: Find this checkbox in the top, right-hand corner
Color: Find this checkbox in the top, right-hand corner. Use sRGB image profile for web images.
Downsizing: Find this in the bottom, right-hand corner. Using the width and height options can reduce the file size.
Expected file size: You can preview the new file size in the bottom, left-hand corner. 
Tip: Make sure you check the preview to ensure your image has maintained its quality. 

3. Utilise the image editing programs available It’s not just all about Photoshop! Adobe has a more affordable image editing application for smartphones and tablets called Photoshop Express. This tool doesn't have all of the capabilities of the desktop version of Adobe Photoshop, but it covers all the basics of image editing. Other alternatives are PicMonkey, PIXLR and Canva.

4. Meet customer’s expectations Customers expect to see clear imagery from multiple angles on each product page.
Tip: Bedhead supplies our wholesalers with a minimum of 3 x lifestyle images PLUS 6 x product images (front, side, back, chin strap, swatch and return label) of each hat. 

5. Make your images SEO friendly When it comes to image SEO it's important to use relevant keywords to help your web page rank on search engines. Search engines don't stop at crawling the text on your webpage, they also crawl your image file names, so make them count.

5 ways to dress up your store to get shoppers shopping

1. Think vintage Window and store displays can be made to look great with very little financial outlay – hit your local op shops for great affordable pieces you can work into your store to show off your wares like vintage chairs, tables and wardrobes. A bit of chalk paint will make anything look great! And seeing items in a setting similar to how they may be in their own home is a good selling point. A hat casually sitting on a benchseat with a stack of books makes it feel a little more homely than shopfront.

2. Dress up your windows In a physical store, look to make a statement with your windows as the first introduction to passers-by. If you’re nervous about where to start, simple is best: look for common themes in your products – like a popular colour or motif - and create a display around that to tell a story. Or take advantage of the prettiness of springtime blooms and fill your window with all the floral things! Our Daisy, Posie or Marguerite floral prints are good ones to use in a Spring-themed window. Paper flowers are simple to make and always look great en masse on a wall, in a window or hanging from the ceiling. You can carry your theme in-store somewhat around your counter area or on display shelves.
Tip: All your efforts will pay off in social media posts too – take lots of pictures of the process of creating the displays, quiz your followers on Facebook or Instagram about which colour or theme to feature this month, and then of course take lots of close-up images and pulled-back shots to use throughout the season.

3. Get creative Fallen branches from your garden hanging from fishing wire make great floating clothes racks for pretty clothes on sweet wooden or cane hangers. Second-hand wardrobes and sideboards make great display cases for cute baby and kid things – pull the drawers out and poke some softies in them with great books propped up behind them. Hang a hat or kid’s bag off the drawer handle. Folding screens and ladders are great backdrops and can be home to throws, muslin wraps or a beautiful dress on a hanger.

4. Style it up While it’s great to have all the like products together, one or two vignettes instore that can be changed up every few days is a great way to spotlight certain items. For these styled set-ups, make sure there is some kind of story or that the items relate to each other in some way. Maybe it’s things you could take on a picnic, or fun things for Dad-and-kid with Father’s Day coming up. Ensure the colours and materials work well together and there is a good mix of shapes, sizes and heights. Overlapping items slightly and using an odd number of items is a good rule of thumb to stick to when styling anything! Have fun playing around with pieces to create different settings – and photograph everything!

5. Don’t forget the kids! If you’re a children’s store or selling kids goods, try and make your store pram and kid-friendly. There is nothing worse than being uncomfortable in a store because you can't move around easily! It's a barrier to a sale, so ensure your the layout of your store flows well all the way through. If you have the space, create a little area for the kids to sit and colour in or play with some of the items you sell in your store.

We hope this has been helpful and we can’t wait to see how you style our hats in your stores! Be sure to put some of our visual merchandising tips (from here and our upcoming handbook) into practice and look out for a stockist competition in coming weeks.