Playing With Someone Better Than You — Weekly Retail Tidbits #260
Playing With Someone Better Than You
“Champions keep playing until they get it right.”
— Billie Jean King
I played a lot of tennis growing up. Not so much now — but as I started working with the newest AI model from my fave, Anthropic, it reminded me of playing tennis with my sister, Holly.
Holly was number one in Louisiana in doubles when she was 16. I loved to play with her way more than she probably loved playing with me. L🎾L. But if you’ve played tennis, you know how much easier it is to play with someone better than you are than with someone who is not as good as you are.
And it’s more fun. Your game is better. You improve. You learn.
That is what I have had to tell myself with Claude Opus 5. I have felt like I am getting pummeled in a tennis game with my sister — mounds of information coming at me like tennis balls, fast and hard, without a break.
I had to stop. I had to learn what I had no idea I did not know. I had to take the time to up my game for a teammate who is incredibly well trained and smart.
Do you ever feel like that?
I think merchandising can be that way. Product is arriving like crazy for fall and holiday. You have to check it all in, organize it, and then make it look pretty on the sales floor — organized for easy shopping, too.
There is way more to merchandising than it seems at first glance. I mean, what is it to take a racket and hit a ball, right? 😂 Putting stuff out in a pretty way that’s easy to shop can’t be that hard.
But it is — especially without experience. So here are some good reminders as you get more practice than you want over the coming weeks.
Color. Pick three colors to be your main ones, make sure those three work together, and build the display in those. A shopper tends to read color before she reads product. When you are learning to merchandise you need a boundary, and three is a good one.
Texture. Think of it as hard and soft. A lot of ceramics or books makes a table all hard, and one of the fastest ways to soften it is with plants and fabric.
Size. Build height and vary it. Tallest to the back or the center, and put your strongest seller where a customer’s eye naturally lands. Eye level is buy level.
Theme. A customer should be able to name your table in three words. Cozy cabin. Hostess gifts. Friday night football. When you cannot name it, she cannot shop it easily.
Two more habits worth stealing from the pros:
One hero per table. Pick a single focal point and let everything else support it. Five heroes means no hero.
Odd numbers. Threes read as arranged. Pairs read as leftovers.
This week, pick one table. Or pick one team member who maybe does not have as much experience as you do, and work together using the basics to build what only you can build.
Progress, not perfection. That’s how your game improves.
xoxo,
❤️ AmyFay
Technology Tip
Have You Told It Not to Learn From You?
Some girlfriends and I sat around my dining room table after dinner a couple of weeks ago, and it wasn’t long before the conversation landed on AI. Everybody was in a different place with it, and even the ones who had been using it a while didn’t know about this one setting.
Whichever one you use — ChatGPT, Anthropic, any of them — find the little settings wheel and look under privacy or security. There is an option about helping improve the model with your data. I keep mine turned off. If you would rather help them improve it, that is fine too. Just make sure it is a choice you made, and not on just because that is the way it came when you signed up.
What the Headlines Mean for Your Store
The Fed left rates alone again on Wednesday, and that was the fifth meeting in a row with no change. If you borrow to buy your fall and holiday inventory, that money costs you the same today as it did back in January, and their next decision is not until September. Nothing to react to this week, which is its own kind of good news.
3 Tango Tidbits
Three Lines Worth a Table This Fall
erin gray — The Perfect Pima Tee
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Erin Gray has her Pima cotton made for her in Peru. Super soft, 100% Pima, pre-shrunk, and a true everyday tee — layer it, wear it by itself, throw it on for just about any occasion.
Our model is wearing the baroque pearl necklace and earrings, with our gold-filled stretch bracelets. The pearls are always the real thing with erin gray.
Faceplant — The Essential Kimono
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Our signature bamboo fabric, soft and breathable. The kind of thing you catch yourself thinking about in the middle of the afternoon — I cannot wait to get home and put my Faceplant on. 🥰
Mary Lake-Thompson — Fall Is Shipping Now
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Pumpkins, sunflowers and turkeys make us think fall, and Mary Lake-Thompson has those and a lot more. Mary designs alongside her daughter Sara, whose Montgomery Street line is a modern take on classic housewares. Designed, printed and packaged here in the USA.
Featured on Instagram
This one from ORI London made me want a beach day:
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| View on Instagram → |
“The details are not the details. They make the product.”
— Charles Eames
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The details are the game. Enjoy every point. xoxo, |
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June Market Fun
With our star eyes on, because Tango is exploding with great stuff! 🌟
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| Shop Tango here → |
The Tango Showroom is open 10 to 4, Monday through Friday, at AmericasMart in Atlanta, Georgia. Come see us! 🌟
AmyFay Chandler
She reads all of this so you don’t have to. Based in Knoxville, TN, AmyFay is a wholesale sales rep for the brands she represents across Tennessee and Kentucky, and she oversees the D2C side for Sweet Tree Jewelry and Caroline B Cook — two of those brands — making sure brick-and-mortar retailers always come first. She writes Weekly Retail Tidbits (now in its 260th issue) because she’s living the same questions her retail customers are living, and figures things out alongside them. Her whole project: helping independent retailers stay human while the rest of the industry tries to automate them away.
Also from AmyFay
Two of the brands I represent run their D2C side through me, with brick-and-mortar partners prioritized at every step:
- Sweet Tree Jewelry — school-spirit polymer-clay earrings
- Caroline B Cook — children’s books (the Virtue Series, Church Kitty)
Wholesale questions? [email protected]
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