By: Sarah Donnelly, Director of Retail Services, TechTown Detroit

Happy 2020, and congratulations on surviving the holiday season! Welcome to a new year and new decade. It’s time to take a breath to reflect on what worked in 2020 and what needs improvement to make this the best year of your business yet.

Here is a post-holiday checklist that will help you get started. A few highlights include:

• Switch back holiday hours (on all social media and communication channels).
• Pack up and store all holiday décor and create a fresh new year window display.
• Evaluate what you have on order and determine adjustments needed based on your Q4 performance. Don’t stress about returns — use the opportunity to generate new sales!
• Create a markdown strategy: Putting items on sale tends to be inevitable after the holidays, but a thoughtful markdown strategy will prevent your margin from taking too big of a hit.
• Remerchandise: This can be highly effective in giving new life to collections of products, which may prevent you from having to rely on deep discounting.

Here is a checklist to help you complete your annual inventory. When you use this system you will:

• Count everything in your store once, but only once.
• Learn a fail-safe method to spot check for accuracy.
• Properly prepare your store beforehand, so when the time comes to count, everything runs like clockwork.
• Get your staff in the right mood to do the job the right way.

The retail team at TechTown is pleased to offer open office hours starting this month. These one-hour appointments are a great opportunity to discuss your business needs and be connected to tips, tools and tricks for improving your retail business. Topics include (but are not limited to): visual merchandising, retail buying and assortment planning, pop-up strategy, customer service tools and sales forecasting. Both Christina Devlin and Carrie Vestrand have extensive experience in operating independent retail stores and are looking forward to meeting with you to help you move your business forward into the new year.