BC Retail Week 2007

I'm taking a break from writing a regular merchandising article this week to tell you about some other retail resources and current issues.

I just spent all day yesterday at Retail BC's Passion for Retail conference. It was an engaging, high energy and informative event.

I met some great people who have some innovative services and resources for retailers:

Warren from myHRtool.com
This is a scheduling solution that helps you manage staff and reduce the amount of time that you spend planning and adjusting staff schedules. Definitely an option to investigate if you have more that 2 or 3 staff members.

Trevor from igeno consulting
Are you a larger store with more than one location, and a lot of data to manage? Excel spreadsheets and reports taking up too much of your time? Igeno can help you reduce this admin time, and create clear visual reports that make sense of all those numbers. Check out their case studies on their website. And Trevor is great to talk to.

Michael from Eigen
If you aren't using gift cards yet for your business, you might be missing out. Gift cards are great ways to offer more for your customers. Take a look and see if gift cards are right for your store. Eigen provides gift cards, and other solutions for retailers.

In the conference sessions, much of the talk was about staffing. In BC, it is becoming harder and harder to find good retail staff. There are help wanted signs, it seems, on every street. But here it is only beginning.

In Alberta, the shortage of retail staff has become a crisis. Here's an article from last fall about the staff shortage that is cutting across all industries. In some communities, stores have been force to reduce hours and services to cope with the lack of available workers.

Businesses have to find new and creative ways to find and retain good staff. Retailers need to create great environments that attract not only customers, but employees. Creating a dynamic, motivating and fun environment becomes even more important than it was before.

Store owners and managers need to think about creating stores that people want to be in
- both to shop and to work.

How do people feel when they are in your store?
How are you going to set the mood for your store?

The tone is set in the way everything works together - your people, culture, visual identity, layout and merchandising. The retailers who get this mix right for their customers will be the ones who succeed in this increasingly competitive environment.