Moving product around, every 6 weeks.

I almost can't read retail advice anymore.

My store seems to have stepped outside the mainstream. What seems to work for others, doesn't work for me, and vice verse.

For instance, today there was a bunch of discussion on Game Industry Retailer board about moving your inventory around every 6 weeks (or more often!)

Now I'm always moving things around, in a natural organic way. I call it morphing. Over the course of two or three years, the store will look different. But moving stuff every 6 weeks just to move stuff? Yikes!

All I can think, is they don't have much stuff.

I had Paul, a regular, in yesterday and he started seeing toys and things he had never seen before. It was like blinders had fallen away, and he kept saying "How long have you had this?"

So there's the rational for moving things -- to change the look so that the customers eyes don't automatically pass over them. But then again, what Paul was seeing for the first time, I wasn't too worried about selling -- to someone.

I guess my excuse is, I've packed the store to such an extent, that a customer who is actually open to a new experience is almost BOUND to find something interesting. And to people who have never been in the store (a significant percentage in my downtown tourist zone store) everything is new. I have actually said that to myself: Carry so much stuff that they HAVE to buy something.

Seems to be working. It's a matter of diversity, and depth, and the ability to pay for a lot of material that may not be noticed or sell for a long period of time. But which eventually everything sells. (Yes, I have a few yellowing toys on the wall, but I kind of like to have a few things around that harken back a decade or more, as background. It's part of the overall "feel.")

The way things sell:

I got a "Back to the Future" DeLorean car toy in a few weeks ago, and I must have had 20 regulars pick it up and say "Cool." It took a couple who were in town for a wedding to buy it. That seems to be the usual story nowadays. Either the locals buy it, or a tourist does.

Space is my biggest concern these days.

I'm currently looking at carrying jigsaw puzzles -- and also financing a jigsaw puzzle section in my wife's store.

Why? Because they are stack-able. I can carry a significant inventory in a small footprint. A credible inventory isn't too expensive. And it adds to the diversity of the store, yet another thing to snag a passing customer.

My plan is to put an ongoing puzzle on the round table at Linda's store, and have a stack of puzzles on the bookcases in the gardening section parallel. There is a lot of unused vertical space in my wife's store. (Vertical space is the ONLY space I have left.) Probably buy a round plastic cover to the puzzle when it's not being worked on. (It's near the children's books, so that's a concern, but you can't make omelets....)

My technique is to bring in a product line, streamline it, maximize it, simplify it, add the sales to the total and check to see if I'm "there" yet. Rinse and repeat.

Books and boardgames have put me over some threshold, which I'm really happy about. The store is obviously complicated, what with having comics, books (new and used) games, card games, cards (sports and non-sports), anime and manga, toys, t-shirts and so on and so on.
But that seems to be the price I pay for being in Bend, which isn't as cosmopolitan as it likes to believe it is, is still a relatively small town. Tourists make the difference.

But even though I have reached a viable threshold, I'm not quite ready to say I'm done. Products have a way of becoming obsolete, and it wouldn't hurt to have another couple of product lines in the pipeline that I'm tinkering with.