Category Archives: vm compliance

9th Joy of Retail Spring: VMToolkit to Control Stores

Every retailer is different, and in most cases every store is different, from the obvious variations of culture and taste in an international  portfolio, the clear operational issues between directly owned stores and wholesale partners, to the more subtle challenges of different store manager personalities and store personnel attitudes.

All this requires retailers to create and apply a wide-range of guidelines, tools and processes to get the very best from every store situation – the VMToolkit

 

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VMTookit & operations efficiency benchmarking

Having the … Continue reading →

VM Trends: Tim Radley in Discussion – Retail Design Expo’17

VM Trends: “An End to ‘Easy’ Visual Merchandising!”

Tim Radley, CEO of VM-Unleashed! will be in discussion at the Retail Design Expo 2017

Please come, listen and join in on Monday 8th May, 12pm.
May 8-9, 2017, London Olympia.

 

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Tim Radley is the founder of retail specialist consultancy VM-Unleashed!

His expertise comes from 25 years of working with, and helping, a wide variety of UK and international businesses with their retail performance, store experience and all facets of what has become visual merchandising.

Visual merchandising, in its … Continue reading →

2nd Joy of a Retail Spring – What do my store staff really do?

As retail stores become more remote from the head office of the business, through more diverse and dispersed portfolios, it becomes more and more difficult to know what operations the store teams are performing, how frequently they are performing them, and to what standards.

 

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This understanding is ironically more important than ever as stores serve and survive in a wider variety of contexts, graded and segmented in a growing number of ways, delivering more focused assortments to more different people in a retail world that … Continue reading →

When will head office let me get on with my job?

Store Managers headache no.03

When will head office let me get on with my job?

Instant messaging, store operations and the blessing and curse of constant communication

 

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For many retailers with multiple outlets, and any retailer with a wide store geography, international portfolio and a combination of direct and franchise operations, direct communication tools accessible via in-store tablets and mobile phones are a blessing of the highest order.

These software communication tools are being rapidly deployed and have many operational and social functions.

… Continue reading →

“10 ways to make more money from stores! No.1 Rules….”

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It was Les Wexner founder of the Limited group, a man responsible for the success of some of the most iconic of fashion retailers from Victoria’s Secret to Express, from Abercrombie & Fitch to Bath & Body Works and quite possibly the first retail guru, who said that “retail is detail”

He was right and anyone in retail doesn’t need to be a modern day guru to know that.

That detail begins with the buying and merchandising chain where getting detail right is essential … Continue reading →

Why can’t head office communicate to stores in a coordinated way?

“Headaches of a Store Manager…No2″

Why can’t head office communicate to stores in one coordinated way?

 

An inbox audit of any store manager’s email system will reveal instantly how well, or not, communication to stores is organised, channelled, filtered and prioritised.

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Common headaches apart from sheer volume of messages are repeated messages from different head office functions, or even the same function and person, to direct contradictions in instructions and apparently competing priorities for time and attention.

Time is precious and definitely finite … Continue reading →

“What on earth is happening in my stores?!”

“How can I actually know for certain what is happening in my stores and what my customers are doing, and so ultimately know what to do to improve their experience and my commerciality?”

 

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It is still a widespread scenario that head office retail functions do not know what is happening hour after hour, day after day, inside their stores.

The situation is symptomatic of the gap that still exists in many retailers between head office and stores, and the lack of communication and integration … Continue reading →