The Power of Fashion Merchandising: How to Boost Sales 3x With Strategic Merchandising

The fashion industry is much more than designing clothes and involves a lot of work, from manufacturing clothes to selling them at retail stores. One such delicate but important craft is fashion merchandising. Every fashion designer or person in the industry knows the importance the job holds. You cannot dismiss it as only putting clothes on hangers because it is a skill that helps portray your brand in front of consumers. The more effort put into fashion merchandising, the better the balance between creativity and commercialism. Let us look at how the skillset can help boost sales for your brand.

Why Does Every Brand Need Fashion Merchandising?

The job of a fashion merchandiser is to present clothes freshly and artistically so that brands can maintain familiarity along with their style. The creative process focuses on portraying merchandise in a way that motivates customers to buy them. Most consumers wouldn’t buy the product if they could not envision themselves wearing or using it. Much like a fashion production house, fashion merchandising brings the designs to life. The purpose is to show consumers that the product can be a part of the lifestyle they lead or desire. Fashion Merchandising revolves around the various areas of the industry, such as visual merchandising and online branding.

What Is Visual Merchandising?

Visual Merchandising is concerned with the presentation of merchandise in stores and virtual outlets. Traditionally, fashion brands showcase visuals through window displays, mannequins, racks, and shelves throughout their retail stores. However, virtual merchandising has expanded into e-commerce, social media, and other advertising mediums due to the increased use of virtual media.

Virtual advertising focuses on developing an online presence for the brand. As a brand, you need to maintain uniformity across all channels so that the consumer keeps on getting the service they discovered you for. Social media, marketing campaigns, and online visuals are used to increase the brand reach.

To get into the fashion designing field, you need to be tech-savvy and should understand fashion merchandising besides having an artistic sense of appeal. If you are a manufacturer or a retailer, you need to have people from fashion merchandising involved with the process.

How Does Fashion Merchandising Help Boost Sales?

Even before a customer walks into the store to view the extensive collection, they look at the displayed Fashion Merchandising to decide whether the store has something to suit their interests or not. The first aspect is ‘window shopping,’ which is a crucial point to attract customers into the store. If a brand gets its merchandising strategy down, the brand’s story can be shared in a creative way and would help attract footfall. 

The next crucial aspect is the display with mannequins and their arrangement. Displays with proper lighting and color combinations help build the ambiance. Thus, fashion merchandising helps deliver the brand’s story visually and makes the store look inviting throughout the year. Experts working in top brands like Levi’s say that it is important to ensure that the essence of consumer connection is not lost during the extensive presentation. 

If you are worried that your retail does not have an extensive area to showcase your complete collection, don’t worry! Expert fashion merchandisers have a few tricks up their sleeves to keep the brand essence intact without any compromises. We suggest that you display your current inventory upfront and center to lure in new as well as regular customers with something fresh. 

You could also create a focal point and place the products cascading below to replicate a pyramid (i.e., following the pyramid principle to create a comprehensive visual). As for the colors and aesthetics, it is important to ensure that the theme and feel are not lost. 

We have discussed online branding, but did you know that fashion merchandising concepts are useful in this case too? Since you need to maintain a uniform look for your brand, it is better that your website, social media, and other online methods of revenue also preserve the same. Hence, several brands hire fashion merchandisers exclusively for social media. 

Alternatively, some brands advise the fashion merchandising and social media teams to work together. We suggest that you get an expert who can take over the strategic process and can collaborate with your social media team to reduce the workload and ease the workflow.

Finding The Perfect Fashion Merchandising Expert

Fashion merchandising plays an important role in framing the consumer perspective. Here are some credentials that you should look for in the expert your hire to carry out this process:

• Fashion Education - This requirement is an obvious one, but we suggest you look for someone with a fashion degree who has an understanding of fashion merchandising. It can be achieved through extensive programs at the associate or bachelor level.
• Retail Experience - Education comes in handy, but nothing can experience hands-on experience. Moreover, working in retail lets them put their knowledge to use and analyze the sales results.

If the process seems too difficult or extensive, get in touch with Fashinza to ease the apparel manufacturing and delivery process with help from experts.