Find Your Fashion is coming off one of its worst retail years in its five-and-a-half-year history, and Scoggins sees a number of reasons for this. She sees accommodating the needs of all of her customers as an important step to improving business at Find Your Fashion.
“Any good businessperson is going to zig and zag to meet the needs of the customer in a down economy,” she said. “Part of it is the economy in general, and a big part of it is how much people are shopping online. That’s going to eventually kill brick and mortar if we’re not more dutiful to our little stores. A big part of it was the layoffs, and a big part of it was the move.”
Find Your Fashion moved from Ferndale Station to its new location nearby on Labounty Drive in late 2014. The store’s consignment arm, Find Your Fashion Again, was already located there. Scoggins said people may not have heard about the move and may have lost track of the store in the process.
“Many people were disappointed that we were not consignment,” she said. “So I said ‘I think I’m going to start selling consignment at the back of the store.’”
Within three weeks, Scoggins went from zero to 70 consigners. Find Your Fashion doesn’t buy clothes; rather, the store allows people to bring in their gently used clothes to sell them.
When considering how to handle the influx of consigners, Scoggins found that there was great support for both sides of the Find Your Fashion brand. She opened Find Your Fashion Again on Labounty Drive exclusively for consignment, keeping Find Your Fashion open for brand-new merchandise as well.
However, Scoggins found that people with a variety of shopping styles were purchasing from Find Your Fashion and Find Your Fashion Again. Some wanted solely consignment, some wanted only new merchandise, and some wanted a mix of the two. Having two separate stores made the latter option difficult with two locations.
So, when her Ferndale Station lease expired, Scoggins moved Find Your Fashion into the same space as Find Your Fashion Again.
“Now, we’re all under one roof,” she said. “People love the bigger space of the store. It’s more open. Some of the feedback that I’ve received is that it’s less claustrophobic. People have really appreciated what I’ve done here. Everyone has really appreciated that we’ve managed to bring both boutiques together. Almost six years later, and I’m hoping this is the winning formula.”
The down year has not been reflected in her customers’ enthusiasm for the store, Scoggins said. Despite not pushing or publicizing Find Your Fashion’s bid for the Ferndale Record’s Best of Ferndale awards, the store won the Best Retail prize.
She said the best way to spread the word about Find Your Fashion is to like the store’s page on Facebook and to share it with family and friends. Visit the store’s website at FindYourFashion.com. It is located at 1730 Labounty Dr., Suite 8, in Ferndale.
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