Susan Dickenson

On the Street: buying behavior at Atlanta's July market
July 22, 2008

A regular feature of our live market issues is the buyer question & answer session we conduct on site in Atlanta, Las Vegas and High Point. During this month's Gift & Home Furnishings Market in Atlanta, Meredith Schwartz from our sister publication Gifts & Decorative Accessories joined me for a trek through the halls of AmericasMart to ask buyers if and how rising fuel prices were affecting their purchasing decisions. Their answers, shown below, reflect a wide range of sentiment. Next week, we'll ask the same question of buyers in Las Vegas...
 

Even though business is tough, we definitely see an increase in our sales of accessories so we are actually stocking more accessories and buying heavier. We feel like right now, for our business, people don’t necessarily want to change out their whole home or a dining room but they are still looking to improve the look of their interior, so accessories have become very important. And for us, we’re working not only with our own designers but with a lot of local designers and it’s the same story -- to finish the rooms, people need good accessories so it’s something we want to have in stock and have available. --John August Weiss, Lillian August, Norwalk, Conn.

We’re primarily an interior design firm, so we’re somewhat immune from the issues many of the retailers are facing. We don’t have to hold back, but we are being more careful about what we’re buying. We probably won’t buy a lot until the High Point Market, just to kind of wait and ride out the summer and see what’s going to happen. I see our clients being more cautious, but luckily for us our business remains steady. --Brandon Davidson Shives, Brandon Davidson Interiors, Columbia, S.C.

We live in a place where things are very seasonal. We’re in Florida, so everyone goes north for the summer and things get very slow. We’re hoping everyone comes back in the winter and we’re just going to buy for the store, a high-end gift shop, with the hope that everything stays the same. --Judy Gibson, Trafalgar Square, Vero Beach, Fla.

Our store is in Georgia and we’re here to buy jewelry, gifts and accessories. Business has definitely slowed down a lot; fewer people are driving to our shop. We’re anticipating a slower holiday season and will adjust our purchases with that in mind. --Mary Hughes Smith, Mirror Images Design, Ellenwood, Ga.

We have a store in Oakton and Alexandria, sell gifts cards, accessories, we carry Vera (Bradley). We’ve had the shop for six years, long enough to feel the effects of a fluctuating economy. Business is actually great. In Alexandria we’re feeling it a little more; it seems to be more sensitive to the economy. It’s funny – the two locations are only 15 to 20 miles apart but the gas prices in Alexandria are probably 20 cents higher per gallon than they are in Oakton. You can see the difference. Traffic is still pretty good but people are much more discretionary in their spending. They think a lot harder about their purchases. And we’re not anticipating a huge downfall for Christmas, so we’re stocking up. We love Christmas. --Lisa Gaudette, Our Little Shoppe/Abbey’s Hallmark, Oakton, Va.

Our business is going really well; it opened a year ago. We have a 1920s Victorian house in the coastal area. We sell clothing and jewelry upstairs and gifts downstairs, and when clothing is slow we sell more gifts. We have not really been affected by rising fuel prices. We really thought it was going to hurt us, but it hasn’t. We’ve exceeded our sales every month through the summer and we’re really excited, since winter is our busiest season because of tourists. --Terri Liss, Rusty Crickett’s Coastal City Cottage, Bradenton, Fla.

We’ve been paralleling our 2006 numbers but 2007 had been up about 20%. We’re in Utah, and housing in our area has taken a slump. We do a lot of furniture and we’re seeing more of a slump in that than in giftware. We’re not shifting our mix away from furniture: We’re buying more cautiously and not buying as deep. Inventory management is huge now because you never know where it is going to go. We are located in a village of 22 specialty shops, and some of their numbers are up, but they tend to be the newer stores, whereas we were established and we were making a killing. We’re still very profitable, still making money, it’s just not easy money. --Angie Seeley, Gardner Mill Co., West Jordan, Utah

July has been really good. First quarter was down from last year. We find in an election year, people don’t know what’s going to happen, so they’re a little more careful with their money. We get tour buses, and tourism in Savannah is steady or up. We also get a lot of Paula Deen traffic because she’s from here and she’s mentioned us on her show. We would rather do smaller orders and reorders. We’re buying the same things, just in smaller quantities. All our vendors have been very accommodating. Everybody wants a sale. We just went to a gourmet show and we found that a lot of the vendors are giving show specials; incentives for the retailer to buy. --Kay Curl, The Gourmet Marketplace, Savannah, Ga.

In 33 years this has been the most challenging market I’ve come to. Business definitely has been down and it is causing a lot of reappraising, studying and reinventing of the store itself. We’re concentrating on lower priced items, but at the same time looking for the highest markup. At the same time that business is down, health insurance and salaries for employees are up, and we have to close the gap somehow. We recently placed a large order with a company we’ve loved forever because they capped the freight. --Tony Falcone, Fast Buck Freddie’s, Key West, Fla.

Business is going very well. No question fuel does affect things, but the American people are very resilient. They are creative and solved the problem: they made everyone else lower their prices. In our buying now we are careful that everything we choose has value; that is what the American people are looking for. Our traffic is down, but we find that our average ticket sale is up, so one of those balances out the other. --Robert Anderson, The Paper Store, Acton, Mass.

Posted by Susan Dickenson on July 22, 2008 | Comments (1)