“It's important to instill a sense of
exclusivity in your retail area.”
n
n
n
— CAROLINE PERDOMO Director of Spa and Retail The Spa at Woodside Westwood, Kansas
Miraj Hammam Spa by Caudalie Paris exclusively uses Caudalie
products, which can be found online, but Dunham has learned
to pare down the selection at her retail boutique. “We have a
relatively small area for merchandise compared to other hotel
spas,” she notes. “This does, however, allow us to be selective
on our retail products to ensure we are offering items that are in
line with our brand and what our guests are looking for.”
More and more, retail sales are becoming about the
experience. Exclusivity is one way of promoting an
experience, but you can also try visual merchandising to
create a mood, events to generate buzz, or gifts to make
guests come back for more.
“It can be challenging to keep repeat guests engaged in our
retail boutique, but we try to really capitalize on visual merchan-
dising to keep things new,” says Dunham. “By adding new
items quarterly and changing the placement of existing items,
we can use a few small changes to keep our smaller retail area
looking fresh.”
Grand Spa works with their resource partners to offer a gift
with purchase and product bundles for a special discount to
entice customers to buy retail after their services. McWhorter
adds, “We also sometimes have special days where we have an
unannounced extra discount with services to surprise customers
and make them feel special.”
Dunham agrees by saying, “We also work very closely with
our skin care brand. They are always able to offer great gift with
purchase items, samples and literature to our guests, so guests
can try before investing in full-sized products. We prominently
display these retail promotions throughout the spa as well as on
our website and monthly newsletters.”
The promotion of these gifts, deals and events is almost as
important as the sale itself. According to ISPA’s August 2017
Snapshot Survey on marketing, 96 percent of spa respondents
use social media to advertise and market their spa. And why
not? Social media is either free or very low cost, and it is where
your customers spend a ton of their time. The key to social
media promotion is supplementing it with other forms of
marketing.
“The Miraj Hammam Spa by Caudalie Paris allocates a
monthly budget to specific campaigns that are promoted on
social media,” explains Dunham. “They create a curated social
media calendar and have a PR team that engages on social
media and monitors the platforms