Make More Shoes Walk Out the Door
Grab extra sales with an excellent shoe department!
Here is the secret sauce to generating well over 10% of store sales in shoes. It’s how I do it, have managers do it and it works.
10% should be the minimum that a shoe department generates.
Normally clothing and fashion is the top driver of sales in thrift. Shoes are fashion as well, you can maximize those opportunities.
You win when shoes are consistently full and organized. Every customer should always see a fresh, full, and organized selection of shoes.
Depending on sales volume and store hours, that department should be organized and filled at least twice per day. Say 1 pm and 4 pm, your needs may vary.
The key ingredient to keeping the department in top shape is to always have shoes pre-produced in a cart or bin ready to put out on the floor. You don’t need a week's worth ready to go. A day or two ahead is plenty.
The specific steps to organizing and filling the shoe department:
Generally, straiten, get them all pointed in the right direction, and condense.
Pull any damaged, stale, out-of-season, or poor quality, and find the mates to singles.
Take shoes off the bottom shelves and fill holes on the higher shelves. This gives everything a chance to spend some time in premier space.
Then bring the cart or bin of shoes to the floor and fill the space on the lower shelves.
Always be on the alert for shoes that do not meet your standards.
Rinse and repeat.
Consistency over time is the yeast that makes sales grow.
One of my managers applied this formula (actually I stole it) day in and day out. She didn’t have the highest volume store, but she owned the shoe category month in and month out, year after year. Despite other managers' efforts, no one ever caught her.
To be fair, it was as organized as a regular shoe store. Gender, style, size, and color. That’s a ton of work to set up or recover from if it’s let go for a while. Here again, regular daily upkeep kept it simple.
She was master class level, she also personally owned that category making sure it was always to her standards. It doesn’t take that level of detail to create a quick and sustained impact on this category.
One store I worked with wasn’t all that well organized, Mens, womens, and kids were grouped. Athletics were sorta kinda grouped. Tall women’s boots were on a top shelf because that's the onlyl place they can go. Otherwise, the department wasn’t sorted, sized or categorized, much less colorized.
All they did was fill multiple times per day following the formula above. They kept with it, and the department grew to 15% of store sales in 5% of the floor space. Their average price per item in shoes was $8ish, average sales jumped as well.
A last tip: Someone has to have ownership of the department and it has to be kept up every day the store is open. Do that and lots of shoes will walk out the door, and sales will increase.
Full - Fresh - Organized - Priced Right