Madison merchants meeting holiday season’s challenges
Lisa Vannoy, owner of Posh Mommy and Baby Too!, a store that offers a wide variety of children’s items along with things for moms, said this shopping season has been on par with previous years.
Vannoy feels she has been able to persevere during the current economic turmoil because of the variety of merchandise she offers and her commitment to “stay on the cutting edge.”
“When a customer comes in today, they know that when they come in next week there will be something different,” Vannoy said.
She said she has a different sale every week, for example, starting on Dec. 8, she plans to have a crib sale and last week she had a chair sale.
She has also decorated her store for Christmas by displaying an upside-down Christmas tree, which some people have said looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.
Ginger MacNealy, owner of Envy Boutique, said while her location in Madison is not as busy as her location in Huntsville, the Huntsville store’s sales is up from last year.
MacNealy just opened her Madison location at 181 Hughes Rd. Suite 11 in July and feels the main reason it is not seeing the same results as the Huntsville location is because it is newer.
During the week of Thanksgiving, MacNealy ran a special where she discounted everything in the store, but costumers did not know how much an item was discounted until they checked out and “rolled the dice.” Each number on the dice correlated with a discount percentage.
She said she had such a good response to the sale that she planned to continue it until Dec. 7.
Some merchants in Madison are not seeing increasing sales during the busiest shopping time of the year. They are looking at some creative ways to boost business.
Jacklyn Zoller, owner of Jacklyn’s Doll’s and Keepsakes located at 200 Main Street, said that over all her sales were down about 30 percent.
In order to boost sales, Zoller has discounted most of her items by 20 percent. That’s about as low as she can go, however.
Terry Hale, owner of Hale Fire Glass, located down the street from Jacklyn’s, said she did not see a huge boost in business after Thanksgiving either.
She is offering one-of-a-kind Christmas cards painted by Prue Carrico, and angel bookmarks by Mike Birdsong, to entice costumers to shop her store.
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