Yay! Sheena’s back this week!! I know fall is a busy time for my writers so I am very forgiving when they miss a week, but I do miss them! But the good news about them being busy is that they have fun stuff to write about. Sheena has some good stuff coming up for us in the next few weeks and I am excited about it! As for today’s rant….she is taking it to the showroom. She does have a leg to stand on here since this is the world she came from, but it is a new topic for me so I don’t have a lot of insight. Maybe something I will try to learn more about as we slide into the next trade show season. So anyway, “The disclaimer reads: “Sheena’s Weekly Rant is meant for entertainment purposes only and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of all Shoebizness contributors. Here on Shoebizness we like to highlight all different perspectives….  -Julia

The Nothing

I’m reminded of the Queen song “Another one bites the dust”. As we disengaged with another showroom (for the record, we have only ever broke up with 2 in all our years in business) I cannot really find the reasons why this could happen. Well, the obvious being lack of sales. This, I cannot understand. We are having one of our best years and sales are up up up. Retail is great, for us, and so I am sitting here wondering, why can’t this work?

Even more baffling is the fact that we had two reps showing at different venues at the same Market and our shoe doggie did gangbusters and our showroom barely wrote orders. With all of this information at hand, I can almost say with validation that the multi-line ready to wear showrooms/reps does not understand shoes. I think they go into it thinking, “this sucks, 8% is bullshit, how the hell am I going to make money”. They are stuck in 12% land and don’t know what to do otherwise. I see it from the other side; shoe orders add up quickly and minimums are higher. One shoe order will be quadruple what a tee shirt order will amount to. Yet, time and time again we find the showrooms tend not to push the shoes and treat it as a stepchild or sorts.  Which again, completely baffles me and I feel myself completely out of tune with the ready to wear reps.

Since I used to sell both, clothing and shoes, I feel like I can explain things to them and get them excited to sell our product. Obviously my attempts are in vain, as they disappoint consistently. I believe there are exceptions to every rule. However, do we see any of the major lines in showrooms these days? No. Which backs up my theory. This theory also blows my other notion of “Woman can sell women’s shoe better than a man” out of the water. If a room full of chicks can’t pull better numbers than a lone shoe dog in a tired shoe show then I will officially admit I am wrong on a few levels. Not all, definitely not, but a few. I still believe that I can walk into an amazing, contemporary boutique and out sell any guy that comes before or after me.

At his point, we are over the showroom scene on the West Coast and will keep our sales up with our shoe dog and some roadwork. Not too challenging of task, especially knowing the work will get done. In closing, I will give you shoe dogs a shout out; after all, you do deserve one.

Xoxo

Sheena