Off the Cuff: A Good Showroom Lets You Show Off Your Stuff: Part 3 of 3

June 07, 2010
By Mark L. Venit, MBA, Contributing Writer

In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, we look at some of the issues, challenges and benefits of having a good showroom at your place of business, tagging your samples to help your customers buy “up,” at store fixtures, the use of mannequins and how to effectively display decorated and undecorated samples.

We’ll turn now to some tips on displaying screen printed and embroidered designs, creating an environment conducive to boosting sales and some key considerations for your portable showroom — the one you’ll be using at trade exhibitions.

Factors Affecting Your Display
The wall space above your racks and displays is a good place to show full-front screen printed or heat-printed designs; these displays can be presented on textile (or Pellon-type) squares — preferably framed — and can show designs on a variety of different-color backgrounds. The effect is that of a graphics “gallery,” a feature that your customers are certain to peruse when considering the types of graphics and colors they might like to see on their own garments. By the way, old, used wooden screen printing frames are great for mounting prints!

For displaying embroidered designs, many companies do so by continuously adding designs to showroom cloth banners and placing them into display books. Though you don’t see them often, wing panel display units work particularly well, conserve space, let the customers’ fingers do the walking, and are more readily able to be changed, expanded and updated.

Creating a Successful Sales Environment
Counters, table and chairs, or all three? Most companies in the industry that have commercial facilities have 42- to 48-inch-high counters, over which they conduct business while a buyer and seller both stand. Counters do speed up the process a bit. But I always recommend — regardless of whether you have a sales counter — that you have a table (about the size of a dining room table) and four to six chairs around it in your showroom for those occasions when you’ll show lots of samples or catalogs, and for accommodating two or more people from the same group to create a comfortable environment for more comprehensive selling.

You’ll also find that selling in a table-and-chairs setting keeps buyers with you longer, a situation that almost always boosts your sales. While you’re busy at the table, your customers see all the items on display around the showroom and are very likely to ask about other products.

Making customers feel at home also warrants having refreshments available — water, soft drinks, coffee and tea, and maybe some munchies — in your showroom.

Some other ideas that help make your showroom look professional and well thought out include:

1. Bilingual signage
2. Small 3” x 5” mini-signs interspersed in your displays that remind customers about other things or advantages you offer, as well as prices — where appropriate — such as:
• “Personalize your garment with names of initials — only $4.00 each”
• “2-color numbers — only $1.75 additional”
• “Total Quantity Pricing for all items on the same production run”
• “Guaranteed three-day service on this item”
• “We accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover”

Even though your customers know exactly where they are when they’re visiting your business, it’s also a good idea to have your company name, logo and tag line on display in the showroom.

Whatever your efforts will entail in designing your first showroom or upgrading your existing showroom, you can expect it’ll be a labor of love. Exercising a healthy degree of creativity and some fashion flair will reinforce your company’s identity as a good choice for buyers when they’re purchasing decorated apparel.

Trade Show Displays and Portable Showrooms
Trade show displays aren’t quite the same thing as a walk-in showroom, but allow me a few comments here about creating a booth for use at business-to-business events, as well as end-user or consumer events.

Trade show booths are a form of showroom, though the elements you’ll include in any such endeavor will vary with the type of show, the kind of buyers you’ll encounter and whether the function of your exhibit is to generate qualified leads or for direct sales to attendees. While the subject of portable showrooms is better addressed in doing your homework when you’re contemplating investing in these venues and creating your own display booth, many of the ideas we've discussed also play well in designing a trade show display booth. This includes everything from merchandising the key apparel items in your lines and demonstrating the latitude of your technical and graphic prowess, to establishing your company’s ability to be clever, creative and in tune with current color and style trends.

The major differences between permanent and portable showrooms — beyond size — are the following:

1. Display booths need to be able to be set up and taken down quickly and efficiently.
2. They need to be shipped when necessary at economical rates, and in those cases where you’ll be exhibiting in venues when trade unions control many aspects of booth construction (e.g., electrical, carpentry, transporting the display to your floor location, etc.), your booth should have the ability to be erected without the use of hand or power tools.

God bless wing nuts, hook-and-loop closures and other devices than enable you to do your own thing without tools or union carpenters at $80-100 per hour.

Perhaps the best education you can get about trade show (and consumer event) booths is visiting one. If you’re new to exhibiting, peruse the next event you attend with a new point of view: that of an exhibitor. Should you have any friends or business associates exhibiting somewhere, ask if you can “work” the show with them for a few hours to understand the booth activities, traffic and the scope of the responsibilities you’ll have being on that side of the aisle.

In case you’re wondering which of the hundreds of showrooms that I’ve visited personally wins my endorsement as the best showroom in the apparel decorating industry, it’s Alaska Serigraphics, Anchorage, Alaska. (Regrettably their Web site doesn’t do it justice, so just pop in the next time you’re in the neighborhood. There’s plenty of free parking for your sled and huskies!)

Mark L. Venit, MBA, is president of Apparel Graphics Institute Ltd., Ocean Pines, Md., which provides management and marketing consulting and proprietary research to apparel graphics companies throughout the Americas and Europe. He also is the chairman of ShopWorks Software LLC, a provider of industry-specific business software. Venit teaches pricing, strategic marketing, salesmanship and other business management topics at the Imprinted Sportswear Shows. You can contact him at markvenit@cs.com.



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