Expressing Individuality in your Boutique

A boutique is a perfect place for you to express yourself.  You can be so creative in your decorations, inventory choices, lighting, music, and even your personality.  People love to see eccentric expressions when they shop in boutiques.  Your own individuality can actually help to brand your image and keep customers coming back for more.

Department stores and other retail chains are very limited in what they can do.  They are controlled by a corporate vision that they must strictly adhere to.  Everything in a store contributes to its image.  The types of hangers that they use, the style of garment racks, the color of the wood trim, the volume of the music, and more.  The goal when you are creating your brand is to be consistent in enough areas that customers know exactly how your store makes them feel.

Getting customers to feel something for you requires some inventive measures.  You’re not really tricking the customer, but rather giving them a certain experience.  If you play club dance music in your store, customers are likely to buy things that they would wear when they went out on the town.  If you play folk music, they are more likely to buy organic cotton casual wear.

Use your personality and taste to bring the customer into the feeling that you get when you are in your store.  Many boutiques adopt the “controlled chaos” decorating scheme where nothing seems to go together, and therefore it does.  It’s deliberately chaotic.  This can work really well when you want to continually add odds and ends into your collection.

Really, that is a great way to do it.  Shop antique stores, garage sales, estate sales, and online auctions to find truly unique furniture and store fixtures.  Think outside of the box.  You can use a mannequin to display clothing and accessories, this is true.  But you could also screw hooks all into a mannequin’s body and use it to display your necklaces or hats.  A chair could be just a chair, or it could be discretely hung from the ceiling in a corner for an eye-catching piece of art.

The possibilities are truly endless when it comes to decorating a boutique, but be careful not to go overboard.  Cluttered is not necessarily your goal, because it can distract a customer from buying anything.  If it looks like work to sift through a garment rack or table display, then most people will skip it.  Our eyes are drawn to order.  So, even if your store is filled with knick-knacks, your clothing racks can still remain orderly and easy to sift through.