Welcome to your weekly dose of boutique memes and trends. Boutique Love is dedicated to providing boutiques tools and information to scale their businesses. Let's get started.

Two emails ago we talked about FashionGo Dropshipping. Now it feels like every other day there's more requests to brands to do Synclogic or Live Boxes. In a conversation with a boutique owner (who prefers to remain anonymous), she gave some of her metrics on how she's going away from the traditional Order-Warehouse-Promote-Sell model. "My strength lies in promoting. I have a community of 20,000 buyers and I promote what I know they will like" she said. Her goal is to downsize her warehouse to just enough space to process orders. "I hate warehousing. It's not for me. I love selling." So her approach is to use Synclogic, Live Boxes, and Takeovers to decrease her commitment to inventory. "The biggest struggle I've had is shipping times from vendors." Her customers had grown accustomed to receiving product in a few days but some vendors can take up to 2 weeks to process her orders. Talking about her 3,000 square foot warehouse "I just want that space to process orders that I can't drop ship, otherwise I would be fully remote."

While we push the industry to shift inventory risk from retailers to brands, boutiques need to be prepared for some push back from the better brands that we love. We run into brands only doing live boxes of dead inventory and their slow movers. Understandable. However the trends show that brands and boutiques will need to move in a direction that makes sense for both.

Second to Christmas and a hot date night is when Moms are sending their kids back to school. Parents try and get their kids decked out in new clothes, shoes, and supplies with hopes their kids don't come home crying because they got made fun of. Well it's a great time to be a Boutique Owner too.

Good Morning America said American families will be spending $864 per family for Back to School purchases this year. That's huge, considering in 2020 Parents spent an average of $574 (of course because of the pandemic). But considering the U.S. officially being in a recession, this is great news. Some tips: Here are some great ideas:

This is the drama you didn't ask to know about but it may be good to know if you are visiting Vegas this month for market.

While rumors swirl that MAGIC has it out against the new kid on the block, Las Vegas Apparel, there's more to the story. International Market Centers is a large corporation that runs several markets covering the Apparel, Gift, Home Decor, and Furniture industries. There was an unspoken understanding between the markets that Informa had Las Vegas and New York, and IMC had Las Vegas Gift, Atlanta Apparel, Atlanta Gift. Well, what we were told is that during the pandemic when MAGIC did a pop-up in Orlando, it caused some territorial conflicts. While IMC may have already been eyeing an Apparel show in Vegas, the Orlando Pop-up was said to be the reason they did it.

Now, by no means does MAGIC have a monopoly over Las Vegas. Off Price and WWIN go on at the same exact time. However there is an understanding of the target demographic for each of those shows. Las Vegas Apparel decided to target the same vendors at MAGIC and they went after the disgruntled ones first. This caused MAGIC to write in a non-compete into their registration process. Brands that wanted to do Las Vegas Apparel were not allowed to do MAGIC. Is this allowed? Technically, yes. MAGIC can deny whoever they want. Is it good business? We'll leave that up to you to decide. While some may side with MAGIC that LVA should have stayed in their lane, others may side with the perspective of capitalism and free markets. Laissez faire.

So, if you are going to Vegas this week, check where your vendors are. They may be at Las Vegas Apparel and not at MAGIC.