Post pandemic, face-to-face lingerie stores are striving to appeal to a consumer who is increasingly shopping online. At the same time, ecommerce lingerie stores are trying to make sure the growth they have seen in sales volume translates into bottom line profit and not just more returns. An expert bra fitting service has become a key tool to top quartile trading performance for both of these types of business.
Underlines spoke to Helen Masters of Pudding, a leading bra fitting & sales training provider to stores in the UK & across the world, about how today’s most successful lingerie businesses are:
- upskilling their bricks & mortar bra fitters to wow customers and deliver maximum sales, and
- using bra fitting advice as a tool to reduce returns rates and increase average sales online.
UL: Helen, first of all, tell us a bit about you and what you do
HM: I have a 25-year track record in business and all aspects of retail – strategic and hands on! I spent 10 years in the corporate world, running everything from big operations and sales teams through to corporate strategy and business planning. I learned a lot and got a taste for running my own business so I went on to set up Pudding. In its first guise, Pudding was a top performing, award-winning lingerie retailer. In 8 years of trading, it became the biggest UK trade account for many well-known global lingerie brands and delivered sales and profits at around three times the level of the average independent of its size.
After I started a family, I decided to take a step back from 7 days a week retail and take the business in a new direction, focussing on using my skills and experience to help other lingerie retailers and brands to excel via consultancy and training services. For the last 7 years, I have been working with start-up retailers and brands, well-known independents, department stores, chains, and big-name brands all over the world. One of the many services I offer is bra fitting training, and crucially how to leverage bra fitting for superior sales.
UL: What are the challenges you are working on with your clients, as we come out of the pandemic?
I work with bricks and mortar indie retailers, department stores, lingerie chains and online stores. The pace of change in the last 2 years has been so rapid that right now many of them are still establishing the best operating model for the new retail landscape:
- Face to face stores – it’s all about elevating the customer experience so people have a reason to go back into store and buy more on average when they are there.
- Online retailers and DTC brands – the challenge is different: many of them have benefited from the consumer shift to shopping online, but while sales have grown, they are also facing the challenge of increased returns which can quickly eat into the bottom line.
However, the lingerie sector is uniquely placed to solve both of these issues.
UL: So what’s the formula for success for lingerie businesses in the new landscape?
Obviously, the product mix has changed, and most businesses have responded really well to that. The area that can be more difficult – but also by far the most lucrative – is the sales and service model.
I struggle to think of any other product category where consumers need help & expert advice more than in lingerie, and where giving the right advice in the right way can triple your net sales. The good news for bricks & mortar stores is that a large proportion of consumers still want that face to face, and the good news for online stores is more people are comfortable with & expectant of virtual advice now so it’s a win-win.
What the top bricks & mortar stores are doing: The bricks & mortar stores performing well right now have a proactive, service-led model with an expert bra fitting service at the core – and they ensure their fitters are highly skilled proactive sales people. Incredibly, the type of bra fitting service you offer can raise your conversion rate from the industry standard of 19% to a whopping 50% and can triple your average sale. That’s what I work on with my clients.
What the top online stores are doing: The best performing online stores are realising the need to elevate their offer to mimic the type of bra fitting advice you’d get in a high street store and utilise that to help the customer a) choose the right size and styles to limit returns, and b) buy more than they would have done if left to their own devices.
UL: Tell us the steps you need to take to triple your sales from bra fitting
The 3 Steps to Tripling the Sales of Your Bra Fitters
- Adopt an expert bra fitting process – Tape measure or fit by sight?
- While many expert bra fitters adopt the ‘fit by sight’ method, a significant proportion of stores, particularly bigger chains and those with a heavy online presence, use the tape measure technique. There are pros and cons to both and for many businesses tape measure fitting is far easier, especially at scale.
- The key change recently in the top performing stores is that even the bigger chains are realising that in terms of customer experience and bottom line profits, fitting by sight wins out when the customer is in front of you either in person or virtually. Why:
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- For a start, the average sale is three times higher
- It is the ultimate ‘wow’ experience for customers. When you offer a ‘by sight’ fitting, you transform the way a woman looks and feels.
- It delivers long term profits: You don’t just win a sale, you win a big customer (after all she usually needs to overhaul her lingerie drawer). If you are really good you win a lifelong customer. And if you are really, really good you win an advocate.
- Put Bra Fitting at the centre of a proactive, service led sales model
When I train lingerie sales teams, I look beyond the bra fitting process. I work with them to move from doing what the customer expects to what wows the customer. That is how we triple sales. We work towards a very simple vision of what the end result should look like and this is why I call my sales & service model training the WOW FACTOR programme:
| WHAT I EXPECT | WHAT I HOPE FOR | WHAT WOWS ME |
| Average service | Good service | Great service |
| Do what I ask | Do what I ask well | Do what I need even if I don’t know I need it, go the extra mile and make it an experience to remember |
| You fit me when I ask and I find a bra | You fit me when I ask and I find things I love and want to buy | You fit me when I ask or even if I didn’t know I needed it, transform the way I look and feel and find me lots of things I want to buy now and tomorrow. I won’t shop anywhere else and I tell everyone I know! |
- Go omni-channel
- The strongest businesses are embracing the shift towards the online channel and giving customers the best of all worlds by being omni channel.
- The beauty of fitting by sight without the need for a tape measure is that it can more easily be translated into a virtual fitting environment. Not only does this enable you to grow sales by extending your service to a new customer group, but in the face of returns rates as high as 50% or more in some online businesses, it is a low-cost way of reducing those returns while offering a service of real value and a point of differentiation.
- Whether you see yourself as bricks and mortar or online, there is a place for bra fitting within your offer if you wish to maximise sales and minimise returns.
UL: So what type of results might businesses expect from this approach?
HM: Typically, I see clients double or even triple their sales when they move to this model. It obviously depends on the starting point.
Independent stores: A lot of independent stores already have an expert bra fitting service and a focus on sales. However, they may not be making full use of all channels and they may not be pushing the proactive sales as far as they could – often for fear of being ‘hard sell’, but when it is done well it is not a hard sell at all.
Larger stores and chains: Bigger stores, where staff training has been possibly not had the right level of investment often see big benefits – easily doubling their sales.
Whatever the size or type of store, I have yet to come across a business that cannot make significant improvements whether online or brick and mortar.
UL: How can lingerie businesses find out more?
We run regular bra fitting courses in person, by zoom and via our remote self-service course, so get in touch to find out the next dates. We also run our WOW FACTOR sales programme regularly and offer bespoke consultancy. You can get in touch with us at consulting@puddinglingerie.com or call me directly on 07789 921097 for a free no-obligation consultation. You can also visit the website on www.puddinglingerie.com.
“We are delighted with the results we have seen following the consultancy and training from Helen at Pudding. Our lingerie sales have increased significantly; the team are rejuvenated and the fit by sight method is wowing customers. We have doubled what we were doing versus a year ago with the same team and the same products, simply down to our sales and service approach in store and of course the bra fitting,” Ulster Stores Group
Helen Masters is the owner of Pudding Lingerie Consultancy.
