Off the Cuff: A Good Showroom Lets You Show Off Your Stuff: Part 1 of 3

SALES & MARKETING

Off the Cuff: A Good Showroom Lets You Show Off Your Stuff: Part 1 of 3

May 10, 2010
By Mark L. Venit, MBA, Contributing Writer

If your company has a showroom, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does our showroom tell “our whole story?”

• Does our showroom inspire confidence in our professionalism?

• Does our showroom present our company as neat, clean, efficient, friendly and accommodating?

• Does our showroom motivate customers and prospects to buy items they weren’t looking for, but they decided to order one or two additional products as a direct result of seeing them in our showroom?

• Is our showroom up to date?

If you answered “yes” to these five questions, skip this column and move on to the next one. If, however, you need to ponder what to do with your showroom or to implement building one, read on.

Not all apparel decorating companies have showrooms, of course, but most of those that do may consider a makeover once the insanity of high season has abated. For all the businesses that operate in the real (as opposed to the virtual) world, the mission isn’t to tell you what a showroom is, but to tell you what it should be.

A Showroom's First Impression
First and foremost, your decorated apparel showroom — which will display mostly undecorated apparel — should appear to first-time visitors as an immediate confirmation of your company’s marketing position, identity and everything else good that you want people to know about your company. Indeed, first impressions are lasting ones.

Secondly, your showroom should inspire the visitor to have confidence in your professionalism. How so?

Let's say you’re planning on doing some remodeling at home and a new kitchen is your first priority. You can research a custom kitchen or your dream kitchen at different places, in catalogs and at online showrooms. You can visit a nearby plumbing supply house and look at various components and fixtures, but you may not see total kitchen environments — leaving such matters for more full-service vendors. You can visit a kitchen-remodeling workshop and see samples of more components.

But if you want to see and “feel” different styles of kitchens in terms of size, style, décor, convenience, and get a handle on what’s available to you at varying budgets, it may be best to go to a kitchen showroom. You know, the kind of place that shows lots of kitchens — such at those at a kitchen retailer, or Lowe’s or Home Depot. You can see a broad collection, speak with a salesperson, get literature and planning aids, then go home, mull it over and perhaps start to play with a pencil, graph paper and a tape measure. Then, you can go back to the store when you’re closer to making a purchase. (You also could hire a kitchen design professional to do it all for you — if you can afford one).

Your showroom should say the same thing that a well-organized, neat, clean, attractive kitchen showroom says to a prospective buyer: "You’re in the right place, you’ll find helpful, knowledgeable people here and you’ll be able to get everything you need right here! You’ll also get competitive prices and ample selection — and when you’re finished the project, you’ll love the results!"

Keeping It Neat and Clean
As for "neat" and "clean," you may wonder why it even needs to be mentioned here. While many companies take great pride and devote great effort to keeping their showrooms attractive and up to date, the majority of showrooms in our industry leave much to be desired, especially when it comes to neatness and cleanliness.

The way that showrooms atrophy and become dirty is a result of being taken for granted by owners and staff that become accustomed to how their showrooms look. Because of this, it seems that no one takes the initiative to freshen or clean it. If reading this comment causes you to think about the current condition of your showroom, you obviously need to pay some attention to this vital element of your company’s persona. It ain’t rocket science to get it up to snuff, is it? You might start by asking your mother to inspect the premises and recommend the next course of action. You also could invite some of your good friends, employees and customers to give their honest observations, suggestions and ideas. The sooner you can do this, the better.

There’s ample room and reason to display certain categories of garments and accessories in greater depth and selection — though limited to what’s realistically going to sell your products or what’s needed to better position your offerings and your standard pricing (even if some of the items probably won’t sell!)

In Part 2, we’ll look at tagging your samples to help your customers buy “up,” store fixtures and the use of mannequins, and about whether you should display decorated or undecorated samples.

Mark L. Venit, MBA, is president of Apparel Graphics Institute Ltd., Ocean Pines, Md., which provides management and marketing consulting and proprietary research to apparel graphics companies throughout the Americas and Europe. He also is the chairman of ShopWorks Software LLC, a provider of industry-specific business software. Venit teaches pricing, strategic marketing, salesmanship and other business management topics at the Imprinted Sportswear Shows. You can contact him at markvenit@cs.com.

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