Granted our store was sold as a casualty of the ‘Great Recession’, so perhaps I’m not the best one to talk about this, but I DID spend about 40 years in consumer product retail and manufacturing before that venture. Successful retailing is about creating a niche for your business, but also about servicing your customer and making a profit. Sounds simple, but it isn’t always.
You have to decide what you want to be, make a strong stand at being that, but also be flexible enough to make realistic decisions about what makes sense to develop your business strategy. My original plan was to carry 300+ facings of harder-to-find, smaller production wines and be a destination for somewhat serious consumers. But I also found that I walked a lot of customers who wanted something that they were either more familiar with, or something specific we didn’t have.
Specific: Like Randy… in the first 60 days after opening I counted over 100 requests for Rombauer Chardonnay. So I sold my soul and bought their Cab and Zin to try to get the Chard. I never did get it (don’t ask… it’s an annoyingly painful story). BUT… I then brought in some labels I’d passed over, simply because while I was trying to build customer confidence in our selection and recommendations, I needed some labels they could just grab and buy based on their own comfort level. There was some margin quicksand in that strategy because of price competition, but I tried to keep those wines within a reasonable percentage of our total business.
The same thing happened on the upper end of the price spectrum. To be perceived as in ‘the zone’ I brought in labels like Caymus with which I could only make a small percentage profit, but brought reasonable dollars to the bottom line per bottle because they turned well.
I also found I needed to do some price/value business after a short while. That hurt the most (from a marketing plan perspective) but I isolated those wines in stacks, and they served their purpose.
Granted this was 2006 and 2007, when independent retailers were bobbing and weaving to figure out how to do business. Nobody needed to tell me the economy was in trouble back then. It took CNN well into 2007 to tell me what I already knew. By then my aficionado customers had migrated from buying small production labels by the case and telling me all about their allocation wines coming in… to sitting at the bar over a glass and asking me if I’d buy part of their incoming allocations so they wouldn’t lose them.
The moral of this story is that you have to try your best to stick with your vision but, unless you’re independently wealthy, you also have to figure out how to grow your business and keep the lights on. I suppose the trick is to balance those needs without compromising what makes your business meaningful to your market. Trying to be all things to all people is, and there are lots of books on this, a really bad idea for a small business. Just be careful and make well thought out decisions.
IMHO a boutique store’s decision to bring in Rombauer is is a big deal, but not the same as bringing in J. Lohr or KJ.
Good luck.