Sell, Sell, and ReSale some more…

Since my internship is unique, in the sense that it doubles as my job, I often end up playing two roles: one of a Sales Associate, and the other as Director of Advertising and Marketing. Up to this point, my job as Director of Advertising/Marketing has been mostly to maintain awareness of our boutique. However, we recently relocated to a different area, which present me with some of the following challenges:

-re-branding as a high-end boutique

-communicating with a new audience

-making aware to our existing audience that we have relocated

-bringing our old audience along with us, and maintaining those contacts

This has proved challenging since I work on this alone. Excitingly, though, we have managed to make up to five times the revenue we had accumulated at the prior location. We also broadened our awareness, almost tripling the amount of Facebook and Twitter friends and followers we have. The success I have had thus far has been recognized by the owner, as she is giving me a pay raise for my determination and relentless effort to make our new store a success.

The exposure of Gina’s Closet has increased with our move, and therefore my boss has set better and bigger goals. This time, she wants to work on getting us on television, preferably a reality show titled “ReSale Wars,” following after the current shows: Pawn Stars, Storage Wars, etc. While the idea of getting on television seems far-fetched, there are the types of challenges that I enjoy. To work at Gina’s Closet, one cannot be shy, judgmental etc. as we get people from all walks of life. We have seen the utterly shocking and jaw dropping, to the disturbingly gross and head turning. Now my process is to create a detailed report and analysis of our business, our audience, and our competition (most notably: Plato’s Closet). Although I work with this information everyday, I always find it helpful to update and reinforce the information in my brain. Also, I have taken to Facebook to converse with Gina’s Closet customers about whether this would be a worthwhile deal to embark on. Since this is such a large task, the owner has actually offered me 10% of the entire business of Gina’s Closet upon my success. There are no guarantees this will work, but it is definitely incentive. That being said, if anyone reads this and has tips, please share with  me via e-mail: tuc42980@temple.edu

This internship is great, and is teaching me to interact with all different types of consumers from different demographics. It has been very challenging, however, and I turn to my classes and previous professors for advice, as well as my social contacts for insight into how to reach different types of people. This type of experience is very eye opening to how I will have to manage consumers and clients in a business setting. We often don’t get to have this type of real life aspect when in the classroom, so it’s interesting to apply things from class to my job. As much as teachers always say we will do that, we never believe it…but its true!

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