How To Increase Sales: a chapter from a 1906 book on how to frame.

Marc Lizer

SGF, Supreme Grumble Framer
Joined
Jun 28, 1999
Posts
1,545
Loc
North Hollywood, CA
How To Increase Sales

The great question is how to make people buy. The dealer who knows how to draw trade will do better with an inferior line of goods than the man who does not know how can do with the very best stocked store in the country. In the first place, people must be made to know that the Picture dealer has the goods.

The secret lies in keeping this fact constantly before them in the most attractive manner. In this the store window must play a most important part. If nothing attractive is shown in the window, people will not look for anything attractive inside the store. The store window is undoubtedly the best advertisement the dealer can possibly Put before the public, and he should study how to make it the most pleasing.
As a rule the more frequently it can be changed the better, as people will, after a while, go out of their way to look at the pictures if they know something new is on exhibition daily.

So much for people who pass the store. How to get the majority of the people in the city who do not daily pass the windows to come out of their way and visit the store is a more puzzling question. There must be some advertising done in the local papers in a special and conspicuous way. Not, as a rule, in an expensive displayed advertisement such as a dry goods or grocery store would make use of, but under a proper heading or where the special announcements, entertainments, concerts, exhibitions etc., are advertised or under the last column. Reading notices are valuable, and a judicious cultivation of the city or art editor by invitations to a private view of any new pictures is always a wise investment. The more frequent mention of the pictures in the store by the local papers the better for the store.

Special invitations to old customers by mail to examine anything new and attractive is always a drawing advertisement, Provided the picture dealer really has something new 'and good.

It is a good idea to have tasty circular cards or announcements to distribute freely. And I have known picture dealers to send by mail to a select list some practical recipe for the care of pictures, combined with a neatly worded invitation to have old frames regilded or pictures restored at the leading art store, etc.
 
The dealer who knows how to draw trade will do better with an inferior line of goods than the man who does not know how can do with the very best stocked store in the country.

So, to paraphrase, the Trade Secret of the Framing Business is not how to Frame, but how to do Business.

The interesting thing is that when I get together with other businesspeople, we talk business.

When run into framers they want to to talk framing.

Just an odd observation.
 
Originally posted by Marc Lizer:
When run into framers they want to to talk framing.
Because most framers don't want to talk business. And that is the main reason that our numbers are dropping. (IMHO)

At our latest Chapter meeting the "talk" was CMCs; all the time, everytime there was a break of any kind.

Bells and Whistles, Bells and Whistles.

Betty

[ 09-10-2003, 07:23 AM: Message edited by: B. Newman ]
 
It is a good idea to have tasty circular cards or announcements to distribute freely.

Yes. They did speak with such color as "tasty," like a modern day skater-kid. I double checked, and then checked again.
 
It is not that they don't want to talk business, it is just that they don't know they are in business. Why would they talk about something they do not know they are in?

Alan
 
Alan,
Now thats funny! :D

(I love a smile first thing in the morning!)

betty
 
Alan-In one of my classes, when I give my Bob on Business" spiel, I always mention that we really aren't in the framing business. We are in the Money Making business-that framing is our craft, our skill. And that if you make no money, while you will still have your craft, you won't have a business
 
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