Stores Can Ride Out the Bumps

It’s not quite over yet. COVID cases were dropping, but now are on the rise here and there, causing some campuses to reinstitute precautions. Shipping backups were starting to unclog, then China reimposed lockdowns in certain areas.

For the foreseeable future, campus stores will need to live with a degree of uncertainty. On the plus side, stores learned a lot about flexibility and adaptability in the first wave of the pandemic, and those lessons can be applied going forward.

In the CAMEX22 educational session, Inventory Management in Turbulent Times, a panel of speakers shared their coping strategies for keeping stores stocked and ready for anything. Facilitated by Ella Van Nort, director retail operations and services and director FIDM Foundation, Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, Los Angeles, CA, the panel included Stacy Elofir, director, Towson University Bookstore, Towson, MD; Roxanne Irizarry, national sales manager, MV Sport | The Game; Dillon Rickard, program manager, PartnerShip; and Barry Waters, director, CMU Bookstore, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant.

“You pivot to try to do the best you can,” said Waters. Like many others, his campus, along with the store, closed abruptly. The store was limited in the number of employees who could be on premises at the same time, so web orders were fulfilled in shifts.

It was a similar scenario at the FIDM store in 2020. “We shut down and in two weeks we have to ship out all books and supplies for next quarter,” Van Nort recalled. In the end, though, it turned out to be an opportunity for the store to start selling e-books for the first time.

Orders dried up for suppliers. Irizarry remembered that for about five months her company had no bookings and had to try to figure out what stores might eventually need. “We can’t order when we don’t know what to order,” she said. “We really had to wing it.”

Then just as suddenly, about a year into the pandemic, there was a big surge in consumer demand as places started to reopen and people got vaccinated. Now shoppers were ready to buy, but stores hadn’t ordered much general merchandise, if any, for months.

“It was an opportunity to pull everything we had,” Elofir said. “It was also an opportunity to get rid of some stock that was not so popular.” What had been a slow seller the year before now became quite attractive to customers.

However, stores now had a different problem: no merchandise. Vendors, caught off guard by an unexpected blitz of orders, at first had to hustle to get product out the door and then found their manufacturing facilities, especially if located overseas, couldn’t replace inventory quickly.

“All hell broke loose,” Irizarry said. “We couldn’t get shipments out fast enough, then couldn’t get stock for three months.”

Shipping was stalled as well. Shippers in every state were warning “‘We’re not going to be able to deliver your product,’ and we had to get that message out,” Rickard said. Local terminals had to send drivers home for a few days if they were exposed to COVID.

Waters showed photos of empty apparel cubes at his store to illustrate his difficulty in getting merchandise. “In 35 years in business, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

At the Towson store, Elofir removed some fixtures and spread the merchandise out to make it appear the store was full. “We always wanted it to look good, even if we had to take fixtures out,” she said.

Elofir couldn’t get sweatpants from her usual vendors and ended up contacting a local supplier for any size or color they could provide. She took a flexible approach with other suppliers as well.

“I always asked our vendors ‘What can you do?’” and picked from what was available, she said.

Irizarry echoed that advice. “Think outside the box, it doesn’t have to be in school colors,” she noted. Because her company always stocked larger inventory in grays and other neutrals, she was able to get those in the hands of store buyers when school colors weren’t possible. MV’s decorating facility also was running into difficulty getting enough pieces to run embroidery and applique “so we sold lots of blanks,” she said.

As campus stores get ready for another fall rush, some challenges will remain. Waters hopes to reimagine his store, “making it look different in areas where it looked stale and the same for three-four years,” he said.

Elofir’s store used to have 22 full-time staffers, now there’s 13, mainly due to retirements and a hiring freeze. She and another employee handle the buying, which means “we work with what’s available,” Elofir said. They have narrowed down the type and style of garments to carry in order to streamline ordering and merchandising.

The reduction in staff also means they will need to decide between having a sales space at campus games and events and keeping the main store open at the same time, because there aren’t enough people to do both.

Irizarry recommended that stores order as far ahead as possible. “You can pack and hold for next year, and can always change,” she said. “We’re trying to be as flexible as possible with customers” but can’t ship an order within two weeks. Her company is looking at other potential partners for options.

Rickard also suggested stores anticipate their needs and place reorders sooner. “Be open to other carriers” and reach out to your shipping rep to find out if there are other options for shipping, he said. Another carrier might cost a little more but is in a position to get the shipment to you on time when needed. On the other hand, Elofir cautioned, keep an eye on shipping costs because they’ll be factored into your retail prices “and we don’t want to price ourselves out.”

Your rep might be able to help in other ways. Rickard said he tracked a shipment for Van Nort’s store and found it was held up at a terminal just five miles from FIDM. She was able to get a campus truck to pick up the merchandise right away.

But the most important thing, panelists agreed: In these challenging times, be kind to yourself, to your staff, and to your reps.