Ralf Kircher
Ralf Kircher is Group Executive Editor for SmartWork Media, overseeing INSTORE and INDESIGN magazines. He thinks the perfect jewelry-store experience is one that doesn't make him feel like the bumbling romantic his wife knows him to be.
A swimming pool installer in Virginia found himself in a bind after the crash in 2008: No one was buying pools, his company’s income stream dried up (sorry, couldn’t help myself), and he needed to cut expenses. So, he looked at the $250,000 a year he was spending on traditional marketing and turned to the Internet ... to begin answering questions.
A Consultation Room by Any Other Name Might be a Conversation Starter
We here at INSTORE have two conferences rooms we regularly use: the hot one and the hot big one, referred to as such (or sometimes as “the sweatboxes”) because they are on the top floor of our building and intensely hot until the A/C that is turned on at the beginning of a meeting begins to cool the rooms, normally just as the meeting wraps up.
It’s prom season, I’m seeing from the spate of recent news stories about the rising cost of proms. A story on Yahoo’s The Lookout calls prom costs “genuinely silly. Another on NorthJersey.com contends that because girls are trying to emulate movie stars, the price is rising. The Houston Chronicle report on a survey by Visa simply acknowledges that prom is becoming a big production.
I was just going over my notes from The SMART Show in Chicago and realized I had a veritable doggie bag of leftover tips to feast on upon arrival home. Here are three to whet your appetite:
Shane Decker's 28 Things You Should Be Doing with Every Client
Do all these all the time, every time, with every client, said sales trainer Shane Decker during his Monday keynote address at The SMART Jewelry Show:
“The day of putting out wine and cheese with some toothpicks is over,” said Terry Chandler of the Diamond Council of America, who was moderating a Sunday panel at The SMART Jewelry Show on store events.
There’s more to simply throwing new designer lines into cases and hoping your customers start buying them, a panel of retailers explained at The SMART Show on Saturday.
Men may be making the actual engagement ring purchases, but it’s their soon-to-be-fiancées you need to be marketing to.
One of the things that’s most fun about The SMART Show, which comes to Chicago’s Navy Pier this weekend, is the Bench Pressure Challenge.
A better way to think of April 15 than Tax Day is to think of it as the day you stand to be considered for recognition for all the hard work you’ve put into your store. Not from the IRS, of course, but from us here at INSTORE and the panel of industry expert judges who review America’s Coolest Stores entries.
