Berkshires boutique focuses on stellar store merchandising
By Lauren Heist
For the last 10 years, Robin Ban has watched her home accessories store, Seeds, grow into a permanent fixture in Great Barrington, MA. Ban sells an eclectic mix of modern home accessories, gifts and tabletop to the tourists and second homeowners who come to the Berkshires for a dose of culture and outdoor beauty.
Here, Ban talks about her store merchandising techniques and how to cater to a seasonal community.
Robin Ban – I’m in the Berkshires. It’s all the way in Western Massachusetts, and it’s a resort area. It’s called the premiere cultural resort. We have all kinds of music, dance and arts festivals all summer long.
I started out primarily wanting to do very contemporary, reasonably priced tabletop and home accessories. And [I've] kind of morphed into more of a gift shop — more accessories and less focus on tabletop.
Over the years, too, I started out wanting to be very modern, and that wasn’t really so popular here at the time, and I think I then tried to fit into more country, maybe a little bit of ruffles and cabbage roses. And then another store opened that kind of did that, so I just decided to go back to what I did best, and really became very eclectic, with a modern twist…
The thing that’s always been my strong point is store merchandising. How you display things is really everything. You can have the best stuff, and if you don’t display it properly, you’re not going to sell it.
I’d say I change something in the store every day, move something around. As I’m dusting a shelf I might take it apart and create a new display. I like to mix things up. Some things I have all together. I’ll put certain categories, like picture frames are all together, but I put other things in with them. I like to mix up pottery. I usually just have table displays, it’s not necessarily a table setting, but I’ll put different pieces of merchandise together on a table that’s just visually pleasing, and you know, makes some kind of sense together.
I very much define the seasons by what I buy. I like to have the store filled with fall colors in the fall and bright, summery colors in the summer, and sparkly, Christmas-y looking things during the winter. So I focus more on that than doing any kind of decorating or anything…
I also don’t use any kind of commercial displays, which I really hate… when the manufacturer gives you those displays. I think it’s OK for certain types of stores, but I don’t care for them. I like to create my own image and design…
The flow of your store is very important. There is a table right in the center after you come in, and I think I do a pretty good job because most people come in the store and they walk to the right, and then you want them to walk all the way to the back, and I have that flow. People come in, they walk to the right, they walk to the back, there’s another table display near the back and they look around that and come back the other side. That’s very important. You should watch how people move through your store; are they going through your whole store?...
When I first started here… it used to really be dead in the off-season, and I used to not buy anything and I was going crazy. Now I have things coming in steadily in all year. And if things aren’t moving I put it on sale, 50 percent off. Get it out of here, I’m sick of looking at it. I think that’s helped my business tremendously; you always have to be fresh because even though there’s not a lot of people here in February, there’s a lot of people with birthdays in February and Valentine’s Day, and they like to come in and see something new. So I think it helps to keep having stuff coming in and turning over, even if you have to get rid of it at half price.
