Macy’s Exclusive Workshop Schools Entrepreneurs How to Make ‘Magic’

The next session is all about building brand identity. Classes instruct on how to drive brand awareness and how the candidates can use whatever marketing tools they have at such an early stage in their business to drive sales.

“Often, they usually have a large following on Facebook or Twitter or on their own site. So how do you utilize that following to drive traffic to your partner and drive business as you’re building you’re brand? How do you get these elements to work for you?”

Outler says the workshop tweaked their marketing session this year.

“Our class didn’t realize the resources they already had available to them. Some of them had 18, 000 twitter followers, or 20, 000 Facebook fans, and didn’t understand the fundamentals of  how to leverage those people to drive sales.”

Their next class is the dreaded retail math. A nerve-wracking numbers tutorial that teaches the metrics behind a business and figuring out strategy to maximize each opportunity. They are also taught Electronic Data Interchange (E.D.I), the language retail companies use to speak to each other when transmitting orders.

“We give everyone preparatory work before coming to class. We send out a math test so we can assess everyone’s knowledge and based on that we build a two-hour session that helps them understand how their merchant partners can utilize the business. Margin, markup, turnover, sell-through. This is the language we use to talk about and analyze the business and we want our vendors to be versed in that as well. They are looking at cash flows and balance sheets and how financial systems work together. We really want to educate them on that because it is critical. Anticipating what is happening and how to react to it. Can you afford a markdown? Do you have cash available to support a markdown. It affects whether or not your buyer is going to reorder and your balance sheet.”