Unique Boutique was created to better engage the female customers at a golf club. It dedicated 25% of retail space to a boutique-style shop focused on women's apparel. New collections are featured each week on a chalkboard display and in built-in fixtures on a rotating basis. This drives special orders from a catalog and creates urgency to purchase styles before they rotate out. The strategy reduced inventory 25% while increasing sales and profit margins. Women's purchases increased from 16% to 30% of total soft goods sales, meeting the goal of capturing their full buying potential.

1. Unique Boutique
As always, we want to give our members and guests a great shopping experience, but we went above
and beyond to engage our female customers. To do that, we dedicated 25% of the shop square footage to
become the Unique Boutique. The main display is created by hanging a chalk board with LED tape lights to
quarter off the two existing built-in fixtures. The space is constantly evolving: when a new collection comes
in, it occupies the impact board and the previous collection moves into the built in fixture. Each built in
fixture has a bust with a top from the collection, the select inventory on hand in a variety of sizes to sample,
promotional material and photographs, and the catalog for guests to peruse and order.
Faced with the seemingly paradoxical goal of reducing inventory and increasing sales, the solution
was to drive our special order business. We doubled the number of vendors including a number of new
brands to Fountain Head such as GG Blue, San Soleil, JoFit, and Sport Haley. Each collection is carefully
planned, coordinated, and tight in quantity while covering a range of the known sizes of our membership.
With the tight collections, we saw two things: a sense of urgency—the “have to have it” mentality and they
began to enjoy picking their own outfits out of the catalogs. Each Wednesday a new collection takes the stage
in front of the main display while the others rotate through the fixtures, keeping the space fresh and new. The
main display is emblazoned with hand drawn art and key selling features of fabrics or technology. The new
collection is also announced on the club’s Facebook page as well as during announcements before ladies
tournaments. Once a collection has rotated through all fixtures, a four week process, the remaining inventory
is removed from the floor.
While lady golfers comprise 25% of the membership, their buying power in 2014 was 16%. In years
past, the ladies apparel had a turn rate of 6.16 versus a turn rate of 7.74 in men’s, and margins suffered (42%)
due to a high number of sales coming from late season discounts. By creating this space and changing the
approach to buying and selling for ladies, inventory has been reduced by 25% while sales have improved over
last year, thanks to an increase in special orders and most suprisingly, in stock sales. Since the creation of the
Unique Boutique, ladies apparel comprises 30% of the total soft goods sales, accomplishing the goal of
realizing the potential female membership buying power. A boost is also seen in profit margins, up 4%, even
considering the additional costs from shipping on special orders. The ancillary benefits are also seen in our
membership—the ladies love the special thought and attention they get when they step into the Unique
Boutique!