Marketing Lessons from Two Generations of Dress Shop Owners

by | Jan 29, 2024

picture of a block of butter opposite a block of margarine

My nan and my mum both ran the same small business yet had noticeably different approaches to marketing.

My nan marketed in the same way as she buttered her toast. She sliced (yes sliced!) thick slabs of butter straight from the fridge and left it to melt on a doorstop sized piece of toast. With marketing she took the same approach i.e. to devote time to one form of marketing and saturate the immediate vicinity around her. It worked because she knew the area at that time was inhabited with an older generation. Hence her shop was stocked with big granny knickers (before they became fashionable), floor-to-ceiling packets of wool and a nice line in crimpeline dresses. She did very well and when she retired my mum took over.

Now, my mum grew up in an era of pre-sliced bread and margarine so she applied herself to marketing by running several advertising campaigns targeting a bigger area. She found that the oldsters were slightly displaced by a younger set moving in. So, she took the shop in a new direction, adding jumpsuits (it was the 70’s!), evening dresses and sultry underwear to the (now dwindling) range of knitting wool, crimplene dresses and bigger granny knickers.

Some might say it’s horses for courses; but what both women had in common was:

  • they kept finding out what was changing
  • they kept adapting the offer
  • they kept marketing – consistently

Steuart Henderson Britt said: “Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but nobody else does.” And he’s so right. My nan and mum understood that doing their homework and stocking up on the new gizmo didn’t matter a jot if they didn’t market the shop.

 It’s imperative to remember that it’s not the job of your customer to seek you out. It’s YOUR job to remind them about you. So, check and establish if you are visible. Get someone to search for your product or service and if they can’t then you need to increase your marketing efforts to ensure it’s your business, not your competitor’s, that’s in front of the customers!