It's New

Well I'm convinced that blogging is here to stay so I might as well join the club. Hopefully this will serve as a spot to journal my experience in both the retail and wholesale business of soap selling.

I have a retail store in Tarpon Springs Florida that I love. I love retail and the best part for me is doing up displays. Recently we had to cut our store down to half it's size due to needing more production for our handcrafted soaps. It was a challenge to put all of our merchandise in less space but I think the store looks so cute now.

One thing I love about displaying is getting the store to look like a fun place to visit. A place that will make you smile. So I do chairs on the walls and furniture painted in fun colors, use louver doors for shelving and hollow doors as room dividers.

You can see from the picture below that I've taken doors and made a divider out of them that blocks off the productions area. I also hung some sheer fabric in a yellow gold color that isn't visable from the picture. This color yellow gold matches our yellow ceiling. The doors acts as another display area that I've hung some cute sea shell wreaths. I also used some old louver shutter closet doors as a shelving unit. These were so much fun to do and so inexpensive. Because they were used they already had a white paint on them and that saved the step of painting them (louver doors are one of the worst paint jobs) I just wasn't 100% happy with a stark white look so I washed them with some yellow paint thined with water, that took me no time. One set of doors cost me $15 and the shelving unit in the picture has 2 sets of doors plus 1/2 set for the back.

I love to go to thrift stores, salvage yards and garage sales looking for something different to use as a display piece. Chairs have become my new favorite thing to buy. Right now I have 4 chairs as display pieces set up very high in the store. So this one in the picture has some loofahs in a metal tin bucket and because the merchandise on these chairs isn't reachable for the customer I make sure I have more of that merchandise on the selling floor. Customers never fail to comment on the chairs and they think it's neat. I think it's important to do something different in a store that a customer would enjoy seeing. Because I love old chairs I'm trying to incorporate more of them in my design of my store. I have some made up as planters that sit outside my store and then I'll do some more shelving looks with some others that I have waiting to be done up.

One thing I've noticed about picture taking is that it tells the truth. Seems to me after viewing this picture that I need more chairs on the walls. LOL I'll be happy about doing up more of them.