1. Recharge Marketing Plans
2. Stalk Hot Merchandise Trends and Brands Before Buying
3. Take This Tax Break Before December 31
4. Take a Break: It’s Not All Doom & Gloom. Niche and Segmented Markets Still Live.

1. Recharge the Marketing Plan

Still searching for uni-size undies and SmartPhone batteries that never fail? Why would your Marketing Plan – however glitzy the charts or humble the Action Lists – still be chugging along on the same old assumptions from three financial quarters back?? Stuff happens.

Every wholesale apparel source or retail chain store buyer … every mid-sized jewelry reseller or no-warehouse eCommerce dropshipper of fashion accessories … every buyer/seller in the merchandise chain needs a marketing plan. No Worries: Writing a good marketing blueprint is not like thrashing out that intimidating Business Plan Thesis due at the end of M.B.A. courses.

Start with an easy package, like Marketing Plan Pro from Palo Alto. Don’t be distracted by cool tools to make pretty graphics or complex spreadsheets with embedded ROI formulas. The most important work for any marketing plan is Answer the Questions:

What’s your Brand or Business Identity? Being the “Best Source of Men’s Apparel” is not a brand ID. Being the “Lowest-price Source of Off-Price and Closeout Men’s Outerwear and Boots” is a specific market identity.

What’s the Marketing Budget and Will You Stick To It? Marketing Plan software will prompt you to set a budget; list media, trade shows and search engine advertising activities you’ll buy, and make you set measures to know if the media you chose worked.

For example, How many visitors must come to your web site from the Pre-Valentine’s Diamond Discount pay-per-click ads you run — through two different search engines — for that campaign to be cost effective? High cyber foot traffic may not be your goal (though it could be to build brand awareness or drive offline retail store sales). What if you set ad success as X% of Traffic Converts to a Sale; or X% Purchase a Minimum $ Amount? Stick to your plan budget and you’ll know which ad networks are clearly keepers, and which are flawed stones.

Watch out for shiny objects thrown by marketing vendors who promise amazing Return on Ad Spend! Or, guaranteed high Click-Through-Rates! If it’s not in your marketing plan, then it may be a budget-buster. Back-burner it for next time.

Resources: Check out Marketing Plan Pro. For search marketing options targeted to the wholesale clothing, jewelry and merchandise sector, see Advertise At Top Ten Wholesale . Want to see a list of off-price and closeout men’s coats? Search Top Ten Wholesale for Men’s Off-Price Clothing. 

2. Buyer Resolution: Stalk Hot Products & Brands

Scan Most Frequently Searched Products and Brands. These are charts of what wholesale and retail buyers and sellers like you are searching for in the global supply marketplace. Like the hottest women’s shoe brands or designer look-alike handbags. Like whether the term iPod or Nano draws the most interest in electronics. Like whether Abercrombie & Fitch is hotter than The Gap, or if Steve and Barry’s blows both retail chain brands out of the water.

See Top Ten Wholesale Trends  and click the button trend spotter to pull plots of specific search terms, which are filtered from over 20,000 buy/sell searches a day at Top Ten Wholesale search sites. For example, searches on “Handbags” from the previous 30 days:

Stalk Celebrity Trends … Consumers Do. Spy on Glitterati Celebrities who design, sell, distribute or just plain model hot women’s fashions, shoes and accessories. Fashion Mavens have been known to upload photos of their fave celebs to visual search site Like.com and then find matching look-alike items they can buy themselves.

Scan Celebrity Designer Lines Come In All Price Points from our WholesaleU Blog. Get the skinny on Sarah Jessica Parker’s Bitten line – copied from her Sex In the City wardrobe – and where teen and 20-something fans on a budget find SJP’s clothes. Get fashion gossip on Las Hermanas Cruz (Penelope and sister Monica) who design classic clothes in classic black-n-white, which they launched through Spanish chain store Mango. For eco-aware shoe buyers: See superstar Nathalie Portman, whose Te Casan women’s shoes skipped the leather. (Cruelty-free but still gorgeous shoes and sandals.)

3. Take this Employer Tax Break By December 31

• Much as you relish building your business and staring down the challenge of making margins, admit that you want to retire comfortably some day. It’s difficult to keep up with day-to-day business ops, put out brush fires (product that never arrives for the trade show exhibit; product safety recalls before big toy-buying holidays), and also keep up with employment and tax regs.
•  If you have employees who contribute to their own retirement nest eggs, be sure you take the full tax deduction available through a Safe Harbor 401(k) Plan, tailored to small business owners.
•  With traditional 401(k) retirement plans, an employer’s tax deduction depends on how many employees participate in the company’s retirement savings plan: If all of your employees do not contribute to a 401(k), then your deduction against taxable income is limited by formula.
•  If, however, you shop around for an inexpensive Safe Harbor 401(k) (a plan that does not have high administrative fees), then you can take the full deduction against business income … regardless of how many employees contribute to their own savings plans. The difference: If as an employer you match a modest percentage of participating employees’ pay and then allocate those funds to an employee benefits account, the Safe Harbor 401(k) allows you to take the full pre-tax business deduction for yourself … regardless of how few or how little employees contribute.
•  It may sound like a draw — contributing more pre-tax money to an employee retirement fund only to get a maximum deduction on your business taxes. In fact, the tax advantage of the full deduction usually outweighs an employer’s contributions to this Safe Harbor 401(k). Matching contributions to an employee benefits account can be as modest as four or five percent; and you are entitled to the full tax deduction even if only one, or five or ten, employees participate.

This is not legal advice. Be sure to consult with your tax accountant and financial planner to weigh the costs and tax consequences of different business retirement plans. For instance, a SIMPLE IRA plan is favored by many small businesses because it has low administrative fees and requires less government reporting. However, a SIMPLE IRA also has lower contribution limits and, therefore, much lower tax deduction benefits to employers.

4. Cheer Up, Sellers: It’s Not Doom and Gloom Everywhere

This is not a Pollyana Prediction.

And, isn’t it hard to not chew on glass when we learn part of the $700 Billion shuttled from our taxpayer accounts to crash-and-burn mortgage, investment and insurance giants has been re-distributed in fat “merit” bonus checks and lavish vacations … to the same folks who piloted their Wall Street corporate gliders into the Grand Canyon! (What was that election blather about redistributing wealth as a Communist plot? Guess it depends on whose buckaroos get passed around.)

Basta. Enough. C’est la suffit. Problem with global 24/7 news bytes and reporting the Rule of the Averages is that you miss the Minority Reports: I know what mass layoffs and mortgage meltdown have done to much of Michigan; but I live in another part of the so-called Rust Belt where housing prices have held steady and new home construction is perking along. (We never had a housing bubble like the one that blew over Florida, California and Nevada. Nothing to burst.)

Segments of consumer buyer-retail markets also seem recession-proof. Look at commerce niches:

Luxury Jewelry, Watches, Accessories The uber-wealthy are always with us, yes? Carriage Trade products, such as high priced, one-of-a-kind, handcrafted jewelry and luxury goods, cater to label- and designer-conscious shoppers. They shop and thrive even during downturns.

What may have shifted is the desire to “tone it down” or not engage in conspicuous displays of wealth. Did you hear that Hollywood C-lister, Lindsay Lohan, got “floured” at a Paris night spot? Different “e” (ethical treatment of animals) and not economy – Lohan was wearing a fur stole. Some Parisians thought the skin looked better on the small furry animal that used to wear it.

Still, Fashion Trend Reports suggest that goods at the luxury end of the shopping scale are now purchased as wearable — if not easily liquidated – investments. Even shoppers who don’t fall in the top 0.05% of the tax code may splurge on gold, platinum and diamond/emerald/ruby jewelry or jeweled clothing accessories. The purchases are a displacement for more conspicuous activities, like buying up to a bigger home or ordering the latest sports car every new model year. See Jewelry Wholesalers . Luxury jewelry suppliers list their Special Collections and Design-to-Order manufacturing facilities.

What Recession? Brand Week reported on a sizable group of shoppers who are not uber-wealthy (above segment), but neither are they cutting back on clothes, shoes and accessories.

STATS: Estimated eight percent of women in the U.S., totaling 5,400,000 million retail shoppers. An online survey sponsored by a women’s magazine concluded this still-spending group is aged late 20s or early 30s (median age was 29) whose median household income is barely 1/3 of the tax bracket that trips off proposed wealth taxes — $62,000. Just over half work full-time and spend close to $3,000 a year on shoes, clothing and fashion accessories.

Small and mid-sized eCommerce sellers of women’s apparel and footwear can profitably target this niche with marketing programs that feature age and lifestyle demographics, market word-of-mouse through social media channels that attract this age/gender profile, and with special incentives or services that retain the loyalty of this still-spending segment.

Selling Simple. Bad News for restaurateurs. Good News for manufacturers, distributors and wholesale sellers of Kitchen Utensils, Small Appliances, Cookbooks  and Specialty Foods. Fewer people are eating out or ordering in meals more than two days a week (compared to three-to-five days per week before). More lifestyle advertising depicts family entertainment as watching DVDs or on-demand films at home. (This trend was called “cocooning” during the last major economic downturn in the early 1990s.)

Eco-Conscious Clothing, Personal Electronics and Household Products are seeing upticks in consumer demand, even at prices that are higher than warehouse and discount store merchandise driven by lowest-price strategies.

Scan a persistent Green Niche in the apparel and gift markets at Global ECO — Environmentally Conscious and Organic, a trade and fashion show co-located with major international trade show ASAP Global every August in Las Vegas. Focus is on earth-friendly clothing designs, sustainable textiles, green products and strategies for conventional retailers who want to convert non-performing square footage into green boutiques.