Oct 30-Nov 4
VIP SERVICES Fancy your fashion chops? Offer a personal styling service to clients. Simply invite your best customers to come in with the outfits they intend to wear and promise to find the perfect earrings (or whatever) to complete the look.
STOCK Make up last-minute stocking stuffers — nature rock key chains? Eyeglass chains with beads? High-end dog-tags for dogs?
MANAGEMENT Create a schedule to ensure you’re ahead on paperwork and display duties (cleaning, tagging, sorting), so that come December, you can focus almost exclusively on the sales floor.
Nov 6-11
NETWORKING Go to whatever parties and small business events you’re invited to. Meeting people face-to-face is the best way to ensure that when they think of gifts for the holidays, they’ll have a “real person” to go to!
PROCEDURES Study your parking lot. Devise and publicize a policy on staff parking. What do you do if a car needs to be towed?
INVENTORY Arrange now to have larger diamonds in your store ahead of the Christmas week engagement season. Says Terry Chandler, president of Diamond Council of America: “The engagement ring customer wants to see and touch the diamond in real time and often won’t wait for the ‘overnight’ shipment. Don’t reach into your sleigh and come up empty-handed!”
Nov 13-18
WEBSITE Update your site with seasonal elements and feature gift ideas including one special every few days. Highlight your wish-list function.
COMMUNITY OUTREACH Reach out to local charities to identify a family that is in need and organize an internal store drive to help make their Christmas special.
ONLINE Keep posting your event schedule on your social media outlets — email and mailed invites can go astray.
Nov 20-25
MARKETING Nov. 24 means Black Friday and also one month to go until Christmas. Send a reminder: There are only 28 more shopping days until Christmas.
STAFF Part-timers ask the same questions over and over because they weren’t trained on basics. Come up with the most common things that go wrong and prepare answers.
SHOWROOM Start feeding holiday songs into the store lineup. At first, aim for every fourth song, and then over the next five weeks slowly increase the rotation.
Nov 27-Dec 2
GENERAL Trim down your high heels. Shoe-repair specialists can shorten most stilettos by up to half an inch and still maintain the shoe’s original pitch and alignment for between $8 and $15.
INVENTORY Check your orders and stay on top of your vendors. Running out of your core items is almost as bad as ordering too much of a bad seller.
MERCHANDISING Narrow your assortments. Your strongest sellers in October and November are most likely to be the key items that will drive your business in December.