Behind the Boutique with Amy Covington
My last trip to Bay St. Louis was a fun one. I got to visit one of Roux Brands' retailers in the historic downtown area of that charming little city on the beautiful Mississippi Gulf Coast. Wow, that was a mouthful! But really, Bay St. Louis is charming and it deserves all the adjectives it gets. So how did it go?
Amy Covington of Flair Boutique is a great client of ours for a number of reasons: Firstly, she is always quick to tell me when something is over priced or if a particular strategy I'm working on is not valid in the long term. In essence, she's witty and provides a lot of feedback. Secondly, Amy sells a ton of Roux products in her store. She's totally invested in gumbo, she's sold lots of Fleur-de-lis books, and she always picks up new items to test the water with. Lastly, Amy has developed a relationship with the staff at Roux Brands. She's visited us at our warehouse. She's met Casey in Atlanta, and she and Roux collaborator Deannie Bahan are great friends. So how does that relate to you?
Lets start from reason one. A wholesaler can't know what you want if you don't tell them. Feedback is truly critical to success for us all. So if feedback is critical, what is critical feedback? Without giving us performance feedback on how we're doing, we'll never know. So, indeed, critical feedback and feedback in general are important to success. I'm skipping the second reason I enjoy working with Amy at Flair Boutique because the third reason, having a real relationship with your wholesaler is important in order to facilitate feedback. It takes the edge off of what otherwise could have been uncomfortable for some people. For instance, Dena Charlet of Nancy's Corner in New Orleans recently approached me with an issue. It was quite simple, but without a long standing relationship with Dena, she might not have felt comfortable enough to bring it up, or I might have seemed a little off putting with a response. Real relationships are critical to success for a wholesale company.
So on to the third reason I just adore Flair Boutique. It's because creating a fun environment between the retail and wholesale operations of our industry creates an environment where delight grows. This is what we SELL. People don't need our products, they delight in our products. We sell a want. The best way to sell a want is to beam with delight yourself.
I'm not partial to Amy. In fact, I gave her some pretty critical feedback over the displays inside of Flair (she didn't have time to reset from Christmas yet). It was fun, but serious also. Together, we're loving what we do and eventually this delight will make it to the customer. This in turn results in lots of sales. If you don't believe me, then watch this short testimonial video we took inside of Flair Boutique in Bay St. Louis, and let Amy do the talking.
Grace,