SAMPLE SALE SERIES: Prepping Your Store and Staff for Success

Kylie Punke

A Little Prep Goes a Long Way

Hosting a sample sale without prepping your store and staff is like throwing a party without cleaning your house or telling anyone what time it starts—messy, confusing, and way more stressful than it needs to be. A little preparation makes all the difference between a disaster and a success. 

You’ve done the research, nailed the planning, and spread the word—now it’s time to kick off the prep!  

Set the Scene: Prep Your Space

Let’s get physical! To promote a smooth sample sale, your store needs to have a natural, easy to understand flow. Most of your attendees will be first time visitors. You and I both know how overwhelming and confusing it can be to walk into a place for the first time, especially in the midst of an event. Avoid overstimulation by posting signage to direct people, having a step-by-step print out for brides to grab, and if possible, having a greeter at your door to welcome and direct shoppers. You do not want a traffic jam in your entryway!

Your sample sale gowns should live in an open, centralized area. The more organized you can make this space, the better! Remember: you may have high volumes of people searching the racks simultaneously—mom, grandma, and aunt Sally all think they know best. Get creative with your categorizations to disperse crowds.

3 Ways to Organize Your Sample Sale Dresses

• Organize your dresses by price—if you’re using a flat rate pricing method, create easy to read price dividers to place between gowns. We also recommend creating signage for each rack for further clarification (e.g. “$499-$799).
• Organize your dresses by size—place easy to read dividers between dresses to denote the size of that section of gowns. Bridal sizing can be confusing, especially for first time shoppers. Post a generalized gown size chart in an accessible location and/or have staff available to measure brides before heading to the racks.  
• Organize your dresses by style—this is an extra step but one that will serve you well. Find a way to differentiate your gowns whether that be by silhouette or simple vs. detailed. Brides traditionally come to a sample sale with a basic vision. This helps to point your brides in the right direction making their experience seamless and efficient. 

Now, to say yes to a dress, brides need to see it on. Designate a specific try-on space for your brides. This try-on space is ideally tucked away from the chaos to give your brides that intimate moment they need. Oh, and the more mirrors the merrier—don’t make brides fight over one mirror.  

Keep in mind that your racks need to stay as full as possible at all times. Limit the number of dresses a bride can take into her try-on suite. It’s a great idea to have a designated staff member or two running the “noes” back to the rack.

Prep Your Staff Like Pros

The goal of your sample sale is simple: get brides through the door, celebrate their ‘yes’ moment, and send them off smiling. Your team is manning the snaps and spirit fingers—they need to be knowledgeable and confident to run your sample sale like pros.

Staff Prep 101: 5 Quick Tips

1. Make sure they know the inventory inside and out—create a master list of all sale gowns with original prices, sale prices, designers, and sizes. If they know, they can help. This also equips your staff to pull specific dresses that fit a bride’s vision.
2. Host a pre-sale meeting for Q&A—get all of your staff on the same page with goals, organization, and expectations. This is the opportunity for them to clear points of confusion and contention. 
3. Assign staff specific roles—at or after your pre-sale meeting, divvy up your staff based on preferences or strengths. Some roles include: outdoor crowd control, greeter, fitting room manager, rack runner, and check out point person.
4. Practice quick answers to sale-specific questions—predict some of the common customer questions and create generalized responses. Consider questions about returns, refunds, holds, alterations, and current dress conditions.
5. Remind staff to keep the energy positive—the day is going to be wild but fun! Encourage staff to keep the energy levels high with one another and brides.     

Although you’re prepping and equipping your staff now, it’s important to check in with them as the sale approaches and on the day of the sale itself. 

Plan for Payment and Policies

Your checkout process should be quick and clear for both your staff and your customers. That means all devices tested, troubleshooted, and ready to rock—double check your credit card processing device, iPads, registers, scanners, and printers. Although it’s easy to view checkout as a fully tech reliant process, don’t forget about physical labels—I’m talking barcode scanning.

Barcode scanning is an instant way to elevate your checkout process. Forget manually calculating discounts at checkout—manual calculations open the opportunity for human error. Within your POS system, create new labels for each gown and include item discounted price. This will show your customers the original price of the gown and the sample sale price. Remember, this is a best practice for comparison and serves as a buying incentive. If you need a refresh, check out our SAMPLE SALE SERIES: Planning Your Sample Sale for Maximum Impact blog. I get it, barcode scanning can sound daunting—do you really need to go through all this work to create and print new labels? Yes, trust me, the more legwork you do now, the more you’ll thank yourself on sample sale day.   

In Poppy, we’ve made it simple. View our Training Library to see how easy it is!

• HOW TO: Set up Label Design Layout
• HOW TO: Add Sales to an Order with Barcode Scanning
• HOW TO: Print an Inventory Item Label
• HOW TO: Bulk Print Labels from In Stock Inventory

If you’re new to this whole barcode thing, check out our Best Practices for Creating Prom & Bridal Labels for Barcode Scanning blog for all you need to know to get started. Seriously, the sound of the scanner singing at your sample sale will be music to your ears.

Don’t forget to post your final sale policy clearly at checkout and mention it verbally too. Your message is simple and clear: these are “as-is” sales! Sure, you can offer a quick steam or spot touch up as needed, but the mentality is what you see is what you get.

Create a Crowd Control Strategy

Whether you’ve structured your sample sale with pre-sale access appointments or are doing a “free for all” method, you are still going to need some form of crowd control. Make sure your staff knows how many people are allowed and anticipated to be in the store at a time. If you are setting time limits, it’s a good idea to have a time tracking system in place—give this role to one of your staffers. Have them remind brides when they are halfway through and close to the end of their allotted time.

Let’s talk lines—what will the line outside of your store look like? First come first serve or a numbered ticketing system? Get your plan in place now for if it gets packed. We all know what it feels like to be waiting in a line, especially one that may not be moving at a quick rate. You do not want your brides to enter your store bored and tired, keep the vibe fun and energetic from the minute they hop in line to the moment they leave with their dress. 

• Give them something to look at and something to listen to! Find or create a wedding vibes playlist. 
• Find or create bridal games for small groups—better yet give them a Welcome to Our Sample Sale flyer with step-by-step reminders and policies. 

This gets them the information you need them to have and sets them up for success when it’s their time to enter. Talk about maximizing efficiency!    

Don’t Forget the Follow Up

Follow up doesn’t just come into play when a bride leaves your store, it actually happens before a bride enters your store too. Follow up is defined as keeping the momentum going on something you’ve already started. Whether this is after a bride books a sample sale appointment to ensure they show up, or after a bride purchases a dress with you and is awaiting the wedding day, you want to keep the momentum going with your brides.

The gap between booking an appointment and attending an appointment is a critical one. If you are hosting pre-sale access appointments or simply running an appointment structure for your sale, consider designing a follow up process to engage your brides. Unfortunately, it’s common that people will see a sample sale, reserve a spot, then no-show. Not only does this take the spot away from another bride, but it leaves you without the opportunity for a sale. You can’t prevent this from happening, but you can take matters into your own hands. Design a texting flow with simple prompts. Let brides know that in order to keep their spot, they must respond.

Ideas for your follow up flow:

• Ask brides to confirm their price point.
• Ask brides how they heard about the sample sale (marketing plug!)
• Ask brides to send an inspo pic of a dress they’re loving.
• Send brides the link to your event blog and ask them to respond with their favorite emoji when they’ve looked it over.
• Send brides info on bridal sizing and ask them to send back their current jean size.
• Send brides store expectations and payment information and ask them if they have any questions.  

If a bride doesn’t respond, you can use a three strike method—send them a personalized text reminding them of the conditions, shoot them an email in case of a wrong number or service blockage, and give them a call.

Now that you’ve got brides invested in their appointment with you, you can work on serving them afterwards. You likely already have a system in place for traditional follow up, but sample sale brides need love too! Just because they are getting a deal on their dress doesn’t mean that they won’t want accessories and services later on—and on the other hand, if a bride doesn’t purchase at your sample sale, it doesn’t mean that they won’t come back in for a special order gown.

• For your brides that purchased: send a thank you message, your Google Review link, information about the extra services you offer, and sneak peeks of accessories. 
• For your brides that didn’t purchase: send a thank you message, your Google Review link, personalized check ins about their dress shopping journey, and sneak peeks of special order gowns and new arrivals.

Creating a personalized follow up flow puts you a step above the rest. It shows your brides you’re still thinking of them, even after the sale is over. If you’re a Poppy user, check out our how-to on automated flows here.

Prepping your store and your team is what turns a sample sale from stressful to smooth. A clean setup, a confident staff, and a solid plan for the day make all the difference. Do the prep now, and you’ll actually get to enjoy the busy, exciting day you worked so hard for—and remember, Poppy is here to cheer you on every step of the way.

Head over to the next blog in the series: SAMPLE SALE SERIES: Real-Time Tips & Tricks for those day-of details!

Let Poppy simplify your processes and boost your success. Book a demo or fill out the Get Started form to learn more.