THE NEW RETAIL REALITY FOR DESIGNER-MAKERS - THE FUTURE OF RETAIL

Retail is changing. We all notice it and the news are talking about it all the time. It is changing for shopping centres, high street shops, local shops, shows, markets and even for informal sellers; only digital retail is growing, but not for everyone. In the actual circumstances nobody is safe. All the growth plans created at the end of 2019 went down the drain and 2020 confronted us with a difficult new retail reality.

THE SHOPS (HIGH STREET)

Face to Face retail is shrinking for every single brand, big and small, and all of them are cutting costs by closing the non-profitable outlets that were supported by the profitable ones, reducing their operational hours and thinning the amount of employees to the bare minimum. Redundancies are becoming very common everywhere in order to cut costs and keep the plummeting profit as high as...

THE NEW RETAIL REALITY FOR DESIGNER-MAKERS - 2

 -COMMUNICATING YOUR PRODUCTS-

 

Following my last article about the “new retail reality for designer-makers”, I want to emphasize the importance of your content, that is the way of communicating your products properly to the potential buyer within your marketplace, digital shop or website.

For this, you will have to focus on two main things when presenting a product to your potential customers: images and description.

ABOUT THE IMAGES

Images are the graphic representation of the product and are usually separated between the main image (the one that will be presented first) and secondary images (that will be used to show different aspects of the product).

It is extremely important to have high quality pictures in the presentation of your...

 All designer-makers would love to have their own famous chain of stores like Hermès or Louis Vuitton, but the amount of work and money needed is exorbitant.

Starting with positioning the brand: all the advertising, attracting the rich and famous, be featured in all the relevant magazines, establishing a reputation, choosing the locations to build every single shop around the world and then having to hire and train hundreds of employees to fill the positions in those shops feels like an insurmountable task, and that is actually true.

Expanding your business requires a lot of commitment, a lot of passion, a lot of guts, lots of time and a lot of money, but nowadays there are other ways to reach that level without having to invest a single pound or to hire a single person (I have to say that the commitment, the passion and the guts are still required).

There is a very easy way to open new branches for your handmade products: Digital Marketplaces.

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