nickshanagher

Vanessa Friedman of the FT says there were two reasons why Mickey Drexler helped clothes retailer J Crew to sales of $1.7billion in his eight years with the company (previously he took Gap from $400 million to $14 billion in 18 years). First, he saw the opportunity to raise the style quality and move to where there was a "lot of white space" between very cheap clothes and designer. Second, he "took a page from Brooks Brothers' book and it was a high margin, high profit page: you don't pay wholesale. Because if you pay wholesale you have two problems: one, discounters - you always have to drop your prices; and two, margin. Say something costs you $50 to make. You mark it up to $150 for wholesale. The retailers mark it up 2.2 or 2.3 times, which is standard. You can't undersell them, so you have to sell your sweater for $350. But if you are the only retailer, you sell it for $150." Two questions for local retailers: Where is the white space for you?...

In all businesses it is fairly easy to calculate the hypothetical profit margin that you could make but the important thing is to work out the actual profit margin that you do make. In a shop, work out the average daily running costs and then take this away from takings and you have a basic measure of profit. Where it gets interesting is when you try to work out which parts of your business are delivering the profits. For many businesses, putting in place the processes to break down and measure profitability is a big task. Starting from scratch, you have to think hard about where costs should be allocated. You then have to work out what the actual sales figures really are. In retailing, many retailers make the mistake of focusing on mark-up and forgetting rate of sale. If you have a product with a 100% mark up that sells once a week, you may find that a product with a 20% mark up that sells 100 times a day is the real profit generator. The process of finding out is also good for ...