Question George Whalin

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gwhalin

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I am the keynote speaker at Decor Expo in Atlanta. I am doing some additional research on my presentation and would like to hear from retailers, distributors and manufacturers. I have two questions. The first is . . . What are the five biggest challenges facing your business today. And the second is . . . What are you doing differently to grow your business this year than last?

Thank you

I will be speaking at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, September 6th. I look forward to seeing you there.
 
  1. Getting the customers through the doors.
  2. Dealing with sticker shock and closing the sale.
  3. Employees
  4. Increases in Cost of materials sold as well as freight on those products
  5. Increases in fixed costs such as leases, utilities, insurance.
Just a quick 5 off the top of my head.
 
I would agree with FrameMakers (even if he is an OSU fan), and I would be adamant about the order. The biggest problem is getting people in the door with their artwork. If nobody comes in the door, the rest of the list is academic. I see from a quick google search that you aren't coming from the framing industry, so I will also point out that we aren't Starbucks or The Gap. We don't get dozens of customers a day. We may not get a dozen customers a week. We are high ticket, low volume. So I hope you'll keep that in mind.

To answer your second question, I am focusing much more on internet marketing. I've had very good success with websites like Yelp.com. It has brought me a lot of customers, and they are typically younger than the typical framing customer, and less price-sensitive. They chose my business because other customers rated my services highly, and so they are willing to pay for better design and quality.

I think a lot of people here will agree with me that Yellow Pages are becoming less and less cost-effective by the minute. I rarely have a customer coming in because they saw my Yellow Pages ad (and I ask every single customer how they found me, so I track all this religiously). Those that do come in from YP don't spend as much. I've decreased my YP ad size this year over last, and I'll probably do it again next year.

I've also had very little success with direct mail and marriage mail over the past 9 months. Up until last September, my mailings always had a positive ROI. Since September 2007, my response rate has dropped to zero, and I've had a negative ROI on every single mailing. I've tinkered with the offer, with the size of the mailing, with the targets, and the upshot is that nobody is responding. So I'm not spending any more money on that this year.
 
I am a member of VA's Retail Merchants Assoc. which just had it's annual marketing expo.

Since I am the lone framer and could not get my usual person to mind the shop I could not make it :cry:. I am jazzed to hear he will be at Decor!! Hopefully I will be able to hear what I missed from him there.


Here is some info on Mr. Whalin I got off our Retail Merchants site.

George Whalin, author of Retail Success, spent 25 years as a retailer before starting Retail Management Consultants in 1987. He began his career on the sales floor and worked his way up, experiencing some interesting retail along the way.

In the 1960s, he opened and managed the original Guitar Center in Hollywood, California. He sold musical instruments to the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jackson Five, Grateful Dead, and many more well-known and not-so-well-known musicians of the era. “It was common for a famous musician to come into the store, pick up a guitar, and start jamming,” he recalls.

George’s mantra is Focus on the customer. Everything retailers do should make it easy for customers to do business with them. From marketing, merchandising, and selling to policies, procedures, and systems, satisfying the customer should be the number one priority. “This is especially important during difficult economic times,” George explains. “Focus your marketing message on the customer: Why should a customer do business with you? Merchandise your store to make it easy for customers to find things. Hire friendly, personable people and train them to serve customers the way you want them served. Offer convenient hours and equitable return policies. It’s all about building relationships so customers come back again and again and tell everyone they know what a wonderful store you have.”

George’s presentations are information-packed, exciting, entertaining, humorous, and motivational. But his top priority every time he speaks is to give retailers innovative ideas as well as practical, hard-hitting strategies and no-nonsense tools they can put to use right away to build their businesses, sell more merchandise, and better serve today's savvy consumers. Here is just a sample of what is to come.



Looking forward to it George!

best regards,
mary
 
He opened the first guitar center? I would like to get a picture with him just for that.

Problems? Costs are growing wildly. I wished I had time to take some popular vendors and figure what inflation is the last year and compare that to previous years. On top of inflation shipping is getting oppressive. Pricing is elastic and so the more costs rise the more resistance we get and will continue to get.
 
Bingo Jay. People are getting pinched all over and as we raise prices we lose more and more of the market.
 
It's getting harder to find inexpensive mouldings that are good quality. I've got some really cheap-looking mouldings on my wall, but they cost as much as nicer-looking mouldings. Makes no sense to me, so of course it makes no sense to our customers.

And sure, I can get great bargains if I buy a box of 300 feet of something, but I don't know that it's going to sell. Probably it isn't.
 
One of the biggest challenges IMO is getting the word out about our industry as a whole.

Only a small percentage of the population use our services.

When I tell some about what my job is, many are not aware that my job exists. Of course this depends on what demog the person is in, but I think it is true across many demogs.

One of my goals is to educate the general public in general about what we offer and that they don't have to get a frame at a ___mart or big box.

National Art & framing month (October) is a great step in the right direction. We need more ways.
I was just featured in our newspaper http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/search.apx.-content-articles-RTD-jobs-professional_picture_framer.html on the front page of the career section of the classifieds.
It was great exposure for me and the industry and hopefully it will open some eyes.

If we increase awarness about picture framing then we would have larger customer bases.

Best,
mary
 
What a wonderful article; it certainly sheds some light on the profession!
 
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