If you are starting a fashion jewelry boutique, you are entering a multi-billion dollar industry, 38.25 billion to be exact. The fashion jewelry market rises each year, even during and after the pandemic when fewer people visited stores in person.
Now customers are getting out again and shopping for favorites locally. Your clothing and jewelry boutique can be a huge success. Following the fourteen tips below can help you start a fashion jewelry boutique.
1. Create a Business Plan
A business plan helps you get organized and serves as a guide on running your business. It helps you set goals and measure progress. Business plans can include your brand name, mission, vision, company description, finances, and marketing strategies.
2. Understand Fashion Jewelry
Fashion jewelry is much different than fine jewelry. It’s essential to know the difference when starting a fashion jewelry boutique. Fashion jewelry is not an investment item. It’s a trendy accessory often referred to as costume jewelry. Materials used to make fashion jewelry include gold-plating, beads, acrylics, and synthetic stones.
3. Know Your Customer
Who is your target audience? Are you selling fashion jewelry to teenagers, seniors, the super wealthy, or those with modest incomes? Once you determine your target audience, you will better serve them and market to them.
4. Make Your Fashion Jewelry Boutique Legal
There are local and state laws to follow when starting a fashion jewelry boutique: zoning permits, licenses, resale tax numbers, IRS registration, and more. Contact your City Clerk’s office or the local small business association to determine the steps you need to take.
5. Create a Budget
A budget helps you organize your money so that you avoid financial mistakes when starting a fashion jewelry boutique. You can answer questions regarding expenses, annual and monthly. You can itemize supplies, hire staff, inventory, insurance, and marketing.
6. Find a Wholesale Supplier
The right wholesale fashion jewelry supplier for your boutique provides a large variety of trendy jewelry in several categories, including watches, rings, wholesale earrings, wholesale necklaces, and bracelets, which are the most common items sought by customers. A good supplier helps you get quality items that allow you high-profit margins. They also have great shipping, ordering, and reordering process. Plus, they go out of their way to help you succeed.
Other than the relationship you build with your customers, the relationship with your wholesaler can give you an edge over your competition.
7. Choose the Right Location
Your boutique location must be chosen based on research and evidence that proves it is a great place to sell fashion jewelry. You can have the best-designed shop with the hottest new jewelry, but if no one enters your business, it will not make it long-term.
8. Design Your Fashion Jewelry Boutique
How will you layout jewelry for display? Where will you place mirrors? Décor? Checkout station?
Will you play music, and if so, what genre? Designing your boutique can be a fun way to show your personality while also appealing to your customers. Make the focal point of your store the jewelry.
9. Get an Edge Over Your Competitors
It’s not as hard as you may think to set yourself apart from your competitors. Many small acts add up to satisfied customers. Provide excellent customer service and host customer appreciation events. Likewise, reward loyal customers. Know your competitors and how they treat customers, then outshine them.
Study the retail stores in your area that are the most successful. What are they doing right? Then, do it better.
10. Marketing
Almost every business today must do some marketing to succeed. Social media is a must. Even if you don’t spend money on social media ads, you should be posting every day, showing followers what is available in your boutique. You can supplement social media posts with traditional ads in papers, billboards, radio, referral discounts, and any other creative way you can think of to get the word out about your fabulous fashion jewelry boutique.
11. Take Great Photos
Photos must be a big part of your marketing plan. With the pandemic and more people working from home, it’s more challenging to get customers to leave their homes to go shopping. Great photos will help. If you aren’t a good photographer, include hiring a professional photographer within your budget.
Photos to entice customers are the ones where jewelry products are modeled by real people wearing trendy clothing. Photos are a teaching tool; you show customers how to wear each piece of fashion jewelry so they look and feel fantastic.
12. Price Your Jewelry
Some boutique owners like to price jewelry, so they get the highest profit margin. They don’t mind having products in their store for a long time, waiting for the right customer. Other retailers like to move products soon after they get them in stock. They do this by lowering their profit margins.
Pricing your products should be fair to your business and the customer. Take into consideration your expenses and competitor prices. Work with your wholesale supplier to determine the best price for your customer base.
13. Build Your Brand
Marketing individual pieces of fashion jewelry are only a small part of building your brand. Your brand is how current and future customers identify your fashion jewelry boutique. The name of your business, logo, slogan, mission, vision and all other unique features of your company make up your brand.
Create a content blog on all things fashion jewelry, from designer interviews to upcoming trends. Get your followers to follow your blog by collecting their email addresses. Send out a blog twice a month. You can send out an email offering special discounts for the email group only in the other two weeks. Essentially, the goal is to get access to customers.
14. Go For It
Starting a fashion jewelry boutique is a big deal, and you are the right person to do it. There is no better time than now to take a risk and follow your dream. You can start today by deciding on a creative name that represents you and your product. Then, start following these tips, work hard and you will find success.
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