How to Start a Shoe Store

Starting Your Own Store Store

Background About This Type of Business

If you’re looking for a retail opportunity and have a passion for shoes, then becoming a business owner providing shoes is an opportunity worth looking into. There is profit in retail shoes. You just need to set up your shop correctly, price your products, choose a target market, and do what it takes to succeed.

In this post, you’ll find a large collection of resources that will give you the information you need to get started. You’ll also find a lot of resources that can help you once you’re up and running.

You need to take the time to go through all the information contained in this post. By the time you’re finished, you’ll have a lot of knowledge regarding the shoe industry, and you’ll be able to decide whether you want to move forward with starting your own shoe store.

Is This What You Want to Do?

One key to succeeding in any business is loving what you do while being dedicated. It’s not easy to get started and to make your business a success. If you’re dedicated and passionate about your business, you’ll be able to give it your best. You’ll look for solutions to problems when they emerge instead of looking for a way out.

Do you Have The Necessary Skills?

Do you have the skills to run a retail establishment? Do you have sales skills and people skills? If you’re the one dealing with customers, you need to be able to make sales.

The good news is you can pick up the skills you need to run your business and make sales. This post offers resources to help you get your management skills up to par. You’ll also find a section on selling shoes.

Getting Inside Information

If you want to gain the secrets of running a shoe store, this technique may help. The big idea is to find shoe stores for sale and contact those business owners that want to sell and ask questions. You’ll explore these businesses’ profitability, see the different types of setups, get inside information, and more. You’ll be able to get the answers, based on experience, for many of the questions you have about this industry.

This technique has two benefits:

One: You get inside information from qualified people.

Two: While you’re looking at businesses for sale, you may find one that makes sense to you, and you may end up buying a business and be up and running while making sales the day you take over.,

For more on this method see, An Inside Look Into The Business You’re Considering.

Key Issues to Focus on With This Type of Business

What Type of Shoe Store Will You Open

You need to decide on what type of shoes you’ll offer.

Will you be selling shoes for women, men, kids, or will you offer shoes for the family? Or you may be thinking of specializing in athletic shoes or shoes for work?

Naturally, it’s important to identify the products you’re going to offer. When you specialize in something, it’s easier to identify your target audience than marketing your products to everyone.

Will you offer your shoes from a storefront, or are you planning to sell your products online? Or will you have a mix of both?

Competition

If you’re planning to start a store, you need to do some research to identify your products’ demand. If there is no demand, then it doesn’t make any sense to open in the area.

If you discover there are many shoe stores, you may be dealing with a saturated market. With a saturated market, you have to bring something to the market that is different, missing, or better than what exists, and you need to promote it!

The ideal situation is to find an area with demand, where the market is not saturated.

Can You afford it?

Can you afford to start a shoe store? If you’re planning on a brick and mortar store, you’ll need to stock inventory, which will be a large part of your investment. You have to understand you’ll need multiple styles, and each style has multiple sizes and colors. You may need to stock 15-20 pairs for one shoe style because of the sizes and color.

Consider if you only had 30 styles, you would need to stock approximately 600 pairs of shoes to cover sizes and colors, and that’s only one of each; lets’ say you sell a size 6, in black, you’re out of stock. If another customer wants the same shoe, you don’t have it. If you needed to stock 5 pairs of each, now your inventory has jumped 3,000 pairs for the 30 styles you offer. So from the examples, we went over, you can see how you’re stock can cost you well over $100,000.

Another direction to take is to operate your business online. You can set up a website and use drop shippers to ship the products to your customer as if they were shipping from you. This benefits you because you don’t have to keep the shoes in stock and only ship what sells.

See our page on opening a drop shipping business for more on this concept.

Your startup cost will depend on which route you take, will you carry stock or use a dropshipping method. Will you open a store, or will you operate strictly online. Once you have a plan in place, you’ll be able to estimate your startup costs.

Insurance

If you’re opening a store, you’ll want to make sure you have insurance the minute you take possession of your store. Don’t wait until the grand opening. You need insurance now because there could be an accident or a fire before you open, and you’re responsible.

Talk to an experienced insurance broker that can get you the coverage you need. You might want to ask about interruption insurance, which covers revenue loss if your business closes due to a fire or accident and needs repairs that can take time. See the resource section in this post for companies that offer insurance for shoe retailers.

Add-ons

Are you planning on only offering shoes, or do you plan to offer accessories with your shoes? You can offer matching belts, purses, as well as products that go with shoes. You could also offer a jewelry section and various scarfs to allow a customer to match or accent the shoes they buy.

Getting the Word Out and Getting Customers

You’ll need a budget to advertise your business. Successful advertising campaigns are hard to come by. The key is to start small and test and track results. Do more of what works and stop using those techniques that don’t work.

For advertising locally, see our page on Free and Low-Cost Local Advertising Strategies.

Also, have a look at This Collection of Free Advertising Ideas For Small Business.

If you plan on taking out newspaper ads, see our collection of tips in our post Secrets to Newspaper Advertising.

You can use Google ads or advertise on Facebook to get the word out; see How to Advertise on Facebook With a Limited Budget.

Another method of advertising is the good old radio. See Here’s What You’ll Want to Know About Radio Advertising.

You could contact local clothing retailers and offer to send your customers looking for clothing to them. In return, they refer customers interested in shoes to your store. You could even carry each other’s business cards on at the sales counters.

You can sponsor local fashion shows or other events such as local concerts, plays, talent shows, etc. You can supply the performers’ shoes and exchange you’ll get a sign plus an announcement that your business provided the shoes for today’s event.

You can also sponsor local sports teams to get the word out about your business.

You can create a blog and create articles to bring awareness to your business. For more on blogging, see How to Start a Successful Blog.

Keep in mind all the money you spend on advertising is a tax deduction. So you want to be sure to track all advertising expenses so when tax time comes around, you claim these expenses.

Next – Reources

Now it’s time for the resources mentioned throughout the article. You’ll find hundreds of resources related to the shoe industry and starting a shoe store. Everything is located in this post, and each is just a click or tap away.

The benefit of having access to such a collection is you get a broad overview because each article is provided by different authors.

You can come back to this post anytime you need the resources.

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Starting Your Own Store Store

Background About This Type of Business

Is This What You Want to Do?

Do you Have The Necessary Skills?

Getting Inside Information

Key Issues to Focus on With This Type of Business

What Type of Shoe Store Will You Open

Competition

Can You afford it?

Insurance

Add-ons

Getting the Word Out and Getting Customers

Next – Reources

What to Consider Before You Start

Steps and Considerations

Getting Inside Information

A Simple Guide To Starting A Business

How to Finance Your Business

How To Register a Business

Shoe Store Name Ideas

Business Plan

Trends and Statistics

Profitability and Revenue

Startup and Operating Costs

Equipment

Inventory

Shoe Suppliers

Insurance

Employee Considerations

Business Cards

Logo

Software

Business For Sale

Franchise Opportunities

Established Shoe Store

Marketing Tips

Improve Your Sales Skills

Article Mix

Running a Business

Publications

Terminology

Books

The Latest about Starting a Shoe Store

Google Searches

News

Twitter

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