Creating a Legacy Retail Boutique Business with Darlene Mitchell

1:04.0 My name is Darlene Mitchell and I am a retail business strategist. And my strength really is around inventory and profitability. So I help business boutique owners. Understanding inventory strategies so they can have legacy, not just so they can have a business, but they can have a legacy business, a business that stays around. 1:32.8 I was in corporate retail for 25 plus years. And what I do now is exactly what I did in corporate retail1:51.4 I'm teaching my clients what I learned in big retail and fortune 500 retail.2:12.7 There's a lot of money. There's a lot of trajectory. Like it's a great career, I think for anyone interested in fashion or selling or like how products get to the floor.2:29.8 You are not born with this knowledge. Retail math is very different math than math. 5:43.5 So like a buyer or a merchant, like depending on what the company kind of called it, that's like the lead business person now who I think is like the most similar to like a boutique owner.11:06.2 I don't care what your markup is. Any of that, you're pricing yourself out of the business.  If you don't get that, what are you doing to get that track again?12:17.3 We planned out every promotion. We knew post promotions would happen. They rarely were reactionary.12:45.5 I think that a lot of people in the  boutique space think that it's okay. To constantly run reactive sales because they're like, well, they're running it. The big companies are running it, but we're not seeing again behind the scenes, the look that Darlene and I are always going to give you is like, that is planned.13:39.7  It's heavy duty math. And a lot of people are just not getting that. And to your point, they're running these reactionary sales. I'm like, well, you plan to run that sale? Do you need to run that sale? Or are you just doing it because someone else is doing it? Does your business require that?15:25.4 We let a competitor dictate our business.  No, that's  awful. Yeah, that was awful. It was awful. And imagine the buyers and everyone who put all this work in to develop this product line and we were discounting it like crazy  because we were watching what a competitor was doing.16:13.8  I think most boutique owners, most, you know, I wouldn't say retail businesses doing under 5 million.  They're a little messy behind the scenes. They're a little weird. Like I think until people start to make real money, do they think of investing in someone like a planner?17:04.8 financial planning and your profit and loss statement is really different from your inventory management.17:33.2 Every quarter we look at what's our intention for this next quarter. What's our sales intention? What's our profit intention? Before we place product before we buy product, what's our intention first?18:03.0 Understand how you show value to that customer.18:22.4 There are a couple of things you do before you even get to the product.  Because all those things, everything has to mix for your product mix and your position, right? Because if you just go in and buy products at the right, wrong margin, and it's, and by the way, everyone, it's not find a cost times four to get a four times markup. That is not, that's not a strategy. That's just, that's reckless, right? That's a little reckless. So you want to do all those other things to understand before you buy the product.  Yeah. Right. I love it. So position. Person. Pricing. Product.  And then the fifth and bonus is...