Better Bridal Group and Poppy

A note from our Poppy Advisor, Janice Yoder

As you leave the BBG (Better Bridal Group) Seminar, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by all the education and ideas you have for your business, that instead of returning to your bridal store and implementing them, you hit a state of action paralysis.

At Poppy, we want to encourage you to take the time to find the 1 or 2 things you are ready to start implementing TODAY because we know you can, and your business will thank you for it!

Looking back at day one, Lisa Larter talked about Unveiling Success: The Ultimate Bridal Shop Strategy for Business Growth. If this is your key take away from the BBG Seminar, we want you to know how Poppy can help. And even if you aren’t on Poppy, the recap below will remind you of the information you need to gather in order to make decisions on what you should do next.

Following the 80/20 Rule

From Lisa’s talk, she discussed the 80/20 Rule and the reality that 20% of your products are making up 80% of your sales. Do you know what those items are and what to do with the 80% of products that make up only 20% of your sales?

Within Poppy

Use reports like Top Selling Special Order by Vendor and Top Selling Special Order by Item to help identify your top 20% (items and/or vendors) that account for 80% of your sales. This will help you know how to continue to make excellent buying decisions, as well as help you determine what vendors you should build better relationships/partnerships with. You can also evaluate these reports and see whether you should raise prices in order to achieve a higher profit or if you have an item that would be good to get in another sample with a different size or color to maximize sales and reorders.

Don’t have Poppy?

Run basic sales reports by vendor and by item. Paste the data into an excel or google spreadsheet and filter them by units sold to find which of your items are selling the most, then filter by dollars sold to see the items that are making you the most revenue. Lastly, filter your report by profit to know which items are making you the most money.

Within Poppy

Utilize reports like Non Performing Inventory and Item Performance – Curated Styles to help navigate how to make money on the items that are underperforming. With the curated styles report you can see how many times a dress has been tried on, how many times it’s been a favorite, and how many times it sold. Knowing the conversion of individual dresses and items at your store will help you see which items haven’t sold within a reasonable amount of time, which will help you make better buying decisions in the future. It can also help you sell things off the rack faster and ensuring you are still making money from your samples before they have no value left.

Don’t have Poppy?

Pull an inventory report and then mark down when an item was received into your store, how many times you have sold it, and when the last time it was sold. Also, think about keeping a google form, spreadsheet or even paper copies of dresses brides have tried on in each appointment and mark if they were favorited and/or sold.

Setting KPIs & Goals

Evaluating KPI’s (key performance indicators) and using them, will help you know what goals to focus on this year. Are you going to try and increase your traffic? Does your closing ratio needs to go up? If your closing ratio is strong, how do your items per transaction look? When was the last time you evaluated your average budgets and your average sales? Have you consider raising your prices or simply want to focus on selling more to the brides that are already buying from you?

Within Poppy

Utilize the Closing Ratio report to see your closing ratio by store and then by individual staff members. This will help you be able to set realistic store goals/standards and evaluate individual staff performance.

Don’t have Poppy?

Run an appointment report and a sales by department report. Then do the math. How many items sold divided by how many appointments. Then filter each thing by user and do the same thing.

Within Poppy

The Sales Averages and Sales per Hour reports can help determine your bridal store’s items per transaction and the average dollar amount of a ticket and sales per hour. Next, view the data at an employee level to help them achieve goals based on the store’s averages.

That being said, you want to avoid setting standards for one employee based off another employee’s performance, instead set standards and goals based off of the store averages. This will keep individual employees from feeling defeated if they don’t match up to another employee, and you will instead see the store’s averages steadily increase!

Don’t have Poppy?

Run a sales report by item. Next, take the total number of items you’ve sold and divide it by how many total transactions you’ve made. Then find the total dollar amount of the sales and divide it by the number of transactions, this will be your average sale amount. To find your store sales per hour, run a timesheet report and take your total sales dollars divided by total number of hours worked. You can then go a step further  and filter the data down to each individual associate for evaluation. Some of these reports are most useful if you have a department as a “staple” that way you can see how many additional items you sold to a bride or prom girl when selling them a dress, suit, etc.

Within Poppy

Use the Budget vs Spend report to see if your average transaction should increase. Is the price you are selling items in your store aligned with your brides’ budgets? This report will help you to see if money is being left on the table.

Don’t have Poppy?

You will need to create a system for tracking your brides budgets that are coming into the store and then averaging that. You can then take that average ticket dollar amount that you found above to look at if your average budget is higher or lower than the average ticket. This would also be best done if you have the sales number by a certain department rather than just total ticket.

Managing Marketing Spend

Using data to drive where you spend your marketing dollars is a more efficient and cost effective way to get in front of your potential bridal customers.

Within Poppy

Utilize How Heard and Zip Code Evaluation reports to track your ROI (return on investment) and know how to adjust your spend to get the best bang for your buck. Now you know where to pull back your advertising spend from, where to invest more in and did you find any gaps…where are your untapped markets?

Don’t have Poppy?

Pull a contact list by type of customer, first sort it by how the customer heard about you and then sort it by zip code. Search for that customer and mark whether or not that customer purchased. Go the extra mile and write down how much their sale was. Then do the math. Figure out your closing ratio by how heard type and by zip code, find out your average sale by how heard type and by zip code.

Within Poppy

Next, by viewing the Appointment Count: Day of the week and By Month reports in Poppy, you’ll be able to see what days of the week or months of the year are bringing in what % of your sales and their closing ratios. After soaking up this information, what operational changes could you make to save money? 

Another report to look at is the Appointment Report and filter it by appointment created date to see out what day of the week your highest booking day is (meaning when customers are scheduling their appointments, not the day of their appointment) and then adjust your advertising spend on your digital to align with the trend you are seeing.

Don’t have Poppy?

Run an appointment report and a sales report and then match that information together by date. It might not be a perfect match because of payments taken over the phone, but it will give you something close to help you determine which days of the week and which months bring in the most money or have the best closing ratios. You can also set up conversion events within Google Analytics in order to track how many people are visiting your website and completing the action of booking an appointment. This can help you start to see the information you need to find trends in your most booked/scheduled days.

Once you have all these key pieces of information, you can go back to the circle Lisa presented and evaluate which 1-2 areas you are going to focus on that will have the biggest impact in your store for 2024.

*The Lisa Larter Group does not endorse Poppy Bridal Software, the references to her material is purely used for educational purposes.