Effective frame board management is becoming more important as online retailers evolve to gain market share.
The industry benchmark for your inventory turn rate is between 3 and 4 percent. If your rate is less than 3%, then you may be overstocking your optical dispensary with slow-moving inventory that your patients won’t buy.
Use the tips below to help you better manage your frame boards for profit.
3 Frame Board Management Tips For Your Optical Shop
Evaluate Your Demographics
In frame board management, and in your optometric practice, the most important thing to consider is your patient demographic. If you spent a lot of money purchasing frames that won’t meet your demographics’ style and pricing needs, then you’re pushing your patients away.
Ensuring that you’re building your frame inventory around your community will make it easier for you to market your frames and your practice and will keep you from pushing your patients to online retailers or your competitors to purchase frames.
As you begin to evaluate your demographics, analyses your current patient database and use local demographics to create personas of the patients that visit your practice.
Rebalance Inventory
After taking a deeper look into your community and patient demographics, it’s time to analyze your frame inventory to see if the options you’re offering meet the needs of your patients. The wrong inventory for your patient demographics and pricing strategy may cause your patients to look to online retailers or other practice.
When rebalancing your inventory, break down your frames into categories based on brand, gender design, and pricing. Keep the list current and meet with your optician regularly to make changes based on what’s performing well and what’s not.
Rotate out frames that don’t sell until you find some that work for your community. As you experiment with new items, give them enough time to sell before you analyze their performance.
Reset Your Frame Boards
Using your patient demographics and your inventory matrix, you can begin to give your optical shop a refresh by resetting your frame boards. Using retail shopping best practices, you can organize your boards in a way that guide your patients towards selecting frames.
Strategies like placing frames with high-profit margins at eye level will help guide the buying decision. Additionally, reducing the number of frames you display will help your patients avoid being overwhelmed with too many options.
Originally Published January 2018