5 tips to improve your paint department
Updated: Jun 16, 2020
When is the last time you have done some revamping in your paint department? Well, if it's been a while, know that your competitors work on their selection often, some even every year. Here are 5 quick tips on how to improve...
1. Follow trends and new products
The paint market evolves fast and if you do not pay attention to paint trends you just might miss opportunities.
For example, in the magazine 'Hardware Retailing', Jay Donnelly, Vice President of Sales Operations at Flanagan Paint, a specialty paint store in St. Louis Missouri, talks about a line of new products he brought into his store. Well, one year later, he expects to replace it already. Why? “That’s how fast things change in this industry,” he says. “I have to update my inventory continually but I’ve noticed that when I visit some independent hardware stores and look at their paint departments, many of them are not staying up with the trends and they are letting their products get obsolete. Even when distributors make it easy to return products in exchange for new items, many retailers don’t go through the trouble of swapping them out”, he says, "and that can have a negative impact on the success of the department."
Are you up to date with specialty paints such as chalk and chalkboard paints as well as mirror and glow-in-the-dark paints?
2. Display and decoration