Being in retail is kind of like being a fortune teller, or using a magic eight ball. As a Boutique Owner you have to look into the future and determine what will be trendy, then you have to negotiate a price that will allow you to make a profit, and get the product into the shop just in time for the trend to take off.
When recessions, economic down turns, pandemics, or any other kind of yuckiness happens, your fortune teller or magic eight ball skills are put to the test as you try to keep your boutique business afloat.
The Pop Up Shop Galleria is a group of Houston Based Women Owned shops inside the Houston Galleria Mall. At one point we had 6 locations within the mall and we hosted 86 businesses at a time. When the Covid 19 pandemic occurred we felt a huge responsibility to help these businesses manage through the economic uncertainties.
My name is Brooke and I am the Founder of I Speak Boutique and the Pop Up Shop Galleria. I had to use all of my 30 years of experiences and knowledge to help guide 86 businesses through a very scary time. I also spent a lot of time researching what people were searching for on Google, and I spent a lot of time talking with fellow business owners. I came to the realization that for the immediate future, we had to sell face masks.
That was a hard decision to make. But people were not going out to dinners and parties anymore, so I knew our party dresses and accessories were not going to help all these businesses pay the bills. The one thing that everyone was talking about was masks. So we got together as a group and decided how to create fashionable masks and how to promote them.
That one decision to sell masks, kept our businesses alive because masks ended up being 60% of our sales for several months.
