Independent brick-and-mortar retailers have a key advantage over big box competitors: Their stores are rooted in their communities. Small business owners can leverage that sense of place and connection to people who live there in a way that's very hard for Target or Best Buy to replicate.
On Nov. 21, retailers will promote local shopping with America Unchained! (and Canada Unchained!) events organized by local business alliances. The American Independent Business Alliance has a tool kit here.
By now consumers and business owners broadly recognize the buy-local movement and it seems to gain attention each year, particularly with the recent focus on local food. It's no coincidence that the America Unchained! promotion comes the week before Black Friday. Small retailers want to get customers' attention before the post-Thanksgiving sprint begins.
Yesterday I asked Becky McCray, author of the Small Biz Survival blog on rural and small town businesses, what local stores can do to boost sales during the holidays. McCray, who also owns a liquor retailer in Alva, Okla., offered several ideas that we'll unspool in our ongoing coverage of the holiday retail season, but here's one to think about now: focus on Thanksgiving instead of Christmas.
Outside of supermarkets, most chain stores don't promote around Thanksgiving. They've long since started Christmas-related marketing, which begins earlier each year. Thanksgiving is not a gift-giving holiday. My sense is that it's one of the few American holidays that still feels authentically about what it has always been about, and heavy-handed marketing around it would seem cheap.
So how can small retailers tie promotions to Thanksgiving? By marketing with authenticity, McCray says. "It’s a great time to emphasize family, to emphasize togetherness," she says. This is a natural for food and wine stores, but it's less about what the store sells than putting the products in the context of how people can use them "to provide a warm and welcoming atmosphere in their home right now," McCray says. Even a hardware store can highlight this as a time to make small repairs to ready the house for guests. "Every retailer has some connection to people's lives," she says. "That’s why we exist."
If you spot a creative local holiday campaign or Thanksgiving promotion, let us know in comments below or on Twitter.
I'm trying to get in the habit of pointing to some of the best small business reading from around the Web. I don't promise to post it daily, but I hope to do it regularly. So for today, here are some late links to check out:
Simple is harder than complicated, but businesses like Chipotle and Nintendo are build on doing fewer things than the competition, writes Matt Linderman at Signal vs. Noise.
The big takeaway from Mary Mazzio's powerful new documentary, Ten9Eight, is clear: entrepreneurship skills training for at-risk teens will increase the odds they stay in school. Its title, Ten9Eight, refers to the statistic that U.S. high school students drop out at the rate of about one every nine seconds. The film tells the stories of 14 inner city teens competing in an annual business plan competition run by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. (Be sure to catch my colleague Stacy Perman's profile of the nonprofit from a few years ago.)
Award-winning filmmaker Mazzio, who has written and directed several other documentaries focused on entrepreneurship, including Lemonade Stories and We Are BlackRock, got the idea for Ten9Eight after a conversation with NFTE's founder, Steve Mariotti, at a 2004 screening. After landing funding to make the documentary last year, the former Olympic rower and commercial real estate lawyer set to work chronicling the aspiring entrepreneurs with the goal of convincing their peers to stay in school.
Mazzio says she was most surprised by the velocity at which her subjects' communication skills improved as they made their way through the NFTE contest--and the sheer number of promising kids she met.
"For all the Rodneys and the Annés and the Jamals and the Jessicas that are actually in the film, there are hundreds of thousands of kids that are just like them in low-income communities. Most of America doesn't really realize that," she says.
While acknowledging business curriculum is not allowed in traditional high school settings, she hopes policymakers and educators will consider offering it after watching her documentary. "What this film is, is one tool in the anti-dropout toolkit. It's not a cure-all. It can't solve the crisis."
The film opens this Friday, Nov. 13 in AMC movie theaters in New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, and Kansas City. Free screenings are available for teachers and their students this Thursday, Nov. 12. You can watch the trailer now and catch Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's introduction to it below.
One of the biggest challenges for small retailers preparing for the holiday sales rush is anticipating demand and ordering inventory accordingly. Stores that don't order enough of hot items risk losing business if they sell out. Retailers that order too much could be forced to discount heavily to move the product late in the season or after the holidays. This balancing act is particularly tricky for products that can't be restocked on short notice.
As part of our ongoing look at how a handful of retailers are faring this holiday season, I asked the business owners we're following how they prepared their inventory for this holiday season.
Einmaleins, the European lifestyle and home products shop in Olympia, Wash., ran out of certain products late in the season last year. "We probably would have done at least 20% more if we had product in," the store's owner, Mathias Eichler, told me. He wants to avoid that this season -- but that means stretching finances to stock up before sales pick up. The business, just over two years old, is still trying to establish credit lines with suppliers and lenders that would allow it to comfortably expand inventory. Eichler writes:
As a still reasonably new store, I am trying to work with my suppliers to extend terms -- not always successfully.
We've placed some of our orders very bullishly in early April/May (imports from Europe) and [were] expecting a 40% increase over last year. Since then I don't know if I still can manage that, but the product is in, mostly paid for and we're hoping for the best.
I am in talks with a bank (it's late already) to get a line of credit to place my last holiday orders.
In the course of the last year, we've established our lines we carry better and are expecting an increase almost across the board. ... So, since we were cautious last year and sold out of many of our items we're trying not to make the same mistake. Since November started we've seen a bit of an uptick in sales compared to last year, which is great to see. People are already spending money. Small stuff, stocking stuffers etc. [Under] $10 items.
I'm hopeful, but money is very tight right now with many outstanding bills that will have to wait until December to be paid.
David Sasson of Overstock Art has a particular challenge. He carries 1,500 different paintings, and for best sellers he might stock 100 copies. His hand-painted replica artwork needs to be ordered from China six to 10 weeks in advance. That means that if he runs out of a painting between now and the end of December, he probably won't be able to get more until after the holidays. Here's Sasson's take on managing inventory:
We started increasing our order amounts in August. We are expecting this holiday season to be much stronger then last year and therefore, are ordering quite a bit more inventory. Our focus this year has been to fine tune our inventory process which means we are ordering in smaller batches. However, during this time a year there are paintings we do not want to be out of.
When it comes to ordering frames our lead time is similar to a standard retailer. Our lead times are between two days to two weeks depending on the vendor and shipping time. We are using a simple formula to predict demand in which we stock a two months' supply from the slower vendors and two weeks' supply from the closer vendors. During this time, and since we've seen a spike in demand in the last three months, we've been ordering three to four months' supply on some frames. Also, we are having problems with some frame suppliers who do not have enough inventory, so we might run out of our best selling frames.
Inventory is going to be particularly challenging this holiday season, because it's hard for the entire supply chain to predict what the ultimate consumer demand will be. Last year, since the truly scary period of the financial crisis didn't begin until September, a lot of suppliers and retailers had excess inventory by the time people started cutting back their spending. That resulted in deep discounts.
Now we're more than a year into a period of slackened consumer demand. Businesses cut production to adjust. If consumers decide to spend more than businesses anticipated, stores could find themselves selling out earlier than expected. As Sasson points out, this is already beginning to happen with some of his frame suppliers.
So an open question to retailers: How is your store managing inventory differently this year compared to last year? Let us know in comments below or on Twitter.
Most banks kept credit standards for commercial loans to small businesses (under $50 million in sales) the same over the last three months, while a handful further tightened credit, according...
Advanta Corp., once one of the largest credit card lenders to small businesses, filed to reorganize under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Sunday night. The Spring House (Pa.) company's main operation...
There is a growing faction that views disparity in income and a dearth of economic opportunities in the Middle East as much of a factor that fuels extremism and volatility...
The eight weeks between today and the year’s end could make a big difference for the nation's small retailers. Many shops do a high percentage of their business in the...
This is a post by guest blogger Jonathan I. Ezor. One of the most valuable features of the Web as a business medium is interactivity, the ability of a company...
This is a post by guest blogger Don Sniegowski, the founding editor of the daily franchise news site BlueMauMau. About as many franchise systems offer group health insurance coverage to...
What's it like to run your own company today? Entrepreneurs face multiple hurdles new and old, from raising capital and managing employees to keeping up with technology and competing in a global marketplace. The writers and editors from the Small Business team, Amy Barrett, Amy S. Choi, Nick Leiber, Stacy Perman, Jeremy Quittner, John Tozzi, and Kimberly Weisul, discuss the news, trends, and ideas that matter to small business owners.
The big takeaway from Mary Mazzio's powerful new documentary, 
