Well, hello everyone, it’s Bob Negen, and in this episode of Real Retail TV, I’m going to share a case study of a promotion that generated a ten times, that’s right, a thousand percent increase year over year in a store.

So before I get into the case study, I want to remind you that this coming Tuesday, January thirteen, from ten to four is the Power Promotions program. If you want to learn how to be a promotions master, if you want to learn about a lot of promotions like the one you’re going to learn about here today, you want to be there. There is still time to register.

You will learn about sixty proven promotions. You’ll build out your promotional calendar. You’ll learn AI props that can help you make your planning even easier. If you want to drive a lot more traffic next year, be in the room, the virtual room, on Tuesday. If you can’t make it because you’re in Atlanta, the recordings will be available. So register now because this could be a game changing event for you.

On to the case study. Peter Gem is a longtime coaching client of mine, and he is the owner and CEO of Dorco. Dorco is a shoe brand in Hungary or is now it’s a full on, you know, apparel brand shoe and apparel brand in Hungary. And among other things, they have sixty retail stores.

And Peter came to our last power promotion program, and he learned about the summer solstice sale, the summer solstice promotion. And so I learned about the summer solstice promotion from Tracy Bartholomew from Village Fashions. So I just I just like to steal ideas and and share them. Right.

A Johnny Appleseed of great retail ideas. But this is a great idea because Tracy shared a picture of the summer solstice sale. The summer solstice is the longest day of the year, and she shared a picture of a line, this incredibly long line in front of her store at five o’clock in the morning. The summer solstice sale goes like this.

Usually the summer solstice sales happens, longest day of the year, but it’s fifty percent off from five to six forty percent off from six to seven thirty percent off seven to eight And then once it gets down to twenty, it stays at twenty for the rest of the day.

So Peter took the summer solstice idea, this idea of a progressive sale outside of store hours and brought it into the winter.

So lesson number one, and this is why the Power Promotions program is gonna be so amazing, because when you immerse yourself in ideas, you start to find parallel opportunities.

So the lesson here is you can repurpose an idea. Peter heard about the summer solstice sale and made it into his sale.

So what did he do?

He took the idea and he called it the Dorco store heist. And here is the email that he sent me. He said, There’s a well known criminal in Hungary who was a former national team hockey player. He robbed fifteen banks in the nineties.

He was a star, and people were rooting for him. He never hurt anyone. And there was a there was a day when he robbed two banks on the same day. After they caught him, he escaped from prison.

He was huge. They caught him again after a year in hiding. But this was twenty five years ago. And since then, he turned good.

He was our celebrity at the event, and he made the videos made the videos Rob the Dorco store with me.

So he took that idea and, you know, he did this. He he did the store heist in his flagship store in in in in Budapest. So here’s the second lesson. So the summer solstice sale is a discount driven sale.

You know, the story in the summer solstice sale is that it’s the longest day of the year. But since this wasn’t the shortest day of the year, and since he wanted to apply the same concept, he took the same concept and put a different story around it. So lesson number two is when you can take a story to and help it help and make the story help the discount driven promotion more interesting. It gives you something to promote.

It gives you something to talk about. So he did, know, he did something amazing, right? He found this guy or he knew of this guy and hit this guy’s story became the story of the promotion.

So Peter’s structure was six to seven in the morning was fifteen fifty percent off, seven to eight was forty, eight to nine was thirty. Nine to ten was twenty. From ten to seven in the evening, regular store hours, no discount. Then he did something else.

Another twist that other people put on the summer solstice sale after they learned about it is they had a progressive discount afterwards. So then after normal store hours, which, you know, normally is open from ten to seven. So from seven to eight, was twenty percent From eight to nine, it was thirty percent. From nine to ten, it was forty percent.

From ten to eleven was fifty percent. So do you see what happened? So not only did he have one chunk of time where he was playing scarcity, but then he did it again on the backside. Absolutely brilliant.

So the lesson here is that not everybody wants to get up early in the morning. And by having progressive discounts in the afternoon, you bring people who may not have been interested in getting in on the deep discounts in the morning and you give them another shot at it. And of course, you get another shot at their wallets. You get an opportunity to sell them more stuff.

So that’s so that was lesson number three. Lesson number four is that there’s an there’s an idea and there’s executing an idea. So I am giving you a case study. The world is filled with ideas for promotions, great ideas for promotions. But unless you know how to execute that idea, it’s going to take you a couple of years to dial it in.

And this is why the Power Promotions program is so important, because we’re going to show you exactly what you need to do to optimize each promotion so it can be in a success right out of the bat. I mean, right out of right off the bat, out of the gate, however you want to say it. So it’s important to understand that building it correctly from the beginning is going to make it a lot more effective. So the fifth lesson, and this is a great one. So you got to understand, Peter knows our stuff. Peter knows our stuff. Peter told me, Bob, I have studied the Retail Mastery System like a scientist.

So he knows that when we teach promotions, we always teach that you should have a recap right after the promotion is done. So if you do a recap, you remember what worked, what didn’t. You write it down so when you do the promotion again next year, you don’t make the same mistakes. This is how you make a promotion easier and better and more profitable every single year.

But what I absolutely loved is this guy, the bank robber, said to Peter’s team at the end of the day, whenever I would rob a bank, I always sat down and did a recap. Make sure you do a recap of this promotion. And of course, all of Peter’s teams knows knows this, and they all had a good laugh out of it. But it’s true.

Right? This guy was a successful bank robber because he kept elect eliminating the potential mistakes he could make and kept accentuating all of the good things he did. So this is a really important promotional lesson. Every time you do a promotion, I recommend that you do it before you leave the building.

Right? You close the door, you pour a glass of wine, you order pizza, whatever you do, and you sit down with your team and say, worked today? What didn’t work today? What should we do next year?

What shouldn’t we do next year? If it was an abject failure, should we do it again next year? Can we do it more than once? So all of these things, when it’s fresh in your mind, doing a recap is incredibly important.

And the final lesson, the sixth lesson here is to roll it out.

So I asked Peter, are you gonna do it again next year in all of your stores? And what he said was, I don’t know if I’m gonna do it in all of my stores, but I’m gonna do it in more stores. And we’re also talking about doing it again in the summer.

So, you know, this idea of don’t just do a promotion once, do a promotion, continuously make it better and find opportunities to do that promotion or some variation of that promotion again and again and again.

So the final question I know a lot of you are asking is, what about margins? And when I had the conversation, the face to face conversation, I said, Peter, how did the how did this sale affect margins?

And he didn’t have an exact number in front of him right away, but he said it didn’t affect them that much. And given the volume that I did, again, ten times year over year store sales, one thousand percent. It was worth it. The discount was small.

The increase in sales was huge. So there it is. That’s a case study. That’s the summer solstice sale.

Tweet changed, done somewhere else. I hope that you can use that idea in your business this year. And so finally, one more time, Power Promotions is coming Tuesday.

If you liked what you learned in this episode of Real Retail TV, you’re going to absolutely love what you’re going to learn in our six hours together on Tuesday or in the video replay. So hope you found this helpful, everybody. If you liked it, put it in the comments down below. If you’re watching this on YouTube, give it a like. Subscribe. I’m Bob Negen. We’ll see you next week.