At America’s Best Franchises, it’s our goal to help you make the best possible franchise opportunity choice. We want you to find the ideal franchise for your needs, and to feel completely satisfied with your decision.
We’ve talked about a lot of important considerations, from your background and preferred workflow to your assets and competitive landscape. One thing we’ve never discussed before, however, is the smell of a franchise.
On our Kid to Kid franchise opportunity page, you can see a video from the Director of New Store Management, explaining the selling points of the Kid to Kid franchise system and what separates them from other resale opportunities. In the video, Rachel Woodland talks about training programs, grand openings, and what her role with the company entails. She also talks about their smell.
People who often visit resale shops can tell you there’s a certain smell that pervades the stores—it’s a combination of musty clothing that finally made it to the store after sitting in storage for a long time and all the different smells from all the different households where that clothing has been, all combined in one place. It can be overwhelming. It can cause people who are new to resale shops to decide that the store is dirty. It can make regular resale shoppers feel depressed, comparing the resale shop with department stores and thinking not of the great prices for items that are just as good as new, but of the reasons they’ve decided to pinch pennies.
Regular retail locations often have their scents tailored to help shoppers feel a certain way while they’re in the store. From grocery stores that pipe the scent of warm bread from the bakery throughout the store to Las Vegas casinos, businesses know that the sense of smell connects strongly with emotions — and that those emotions can affect shopper behavior.
Customers looking for high-end clothing at reduced prices might put up with that resale smell to score a deal but there are quite a few people who are turned off from the resale shopping experience because of the feelings that characteristic thrift store smell evokes. Kid to Kid shops instead bring up the fun of bargain hunting and the excitement of being able to choose plenty of great items.
If you’re just beginning to consider franchise options, you might not think about this as a big selling point for a children’s resale franchise. You might focus on things like training, costs, and potential profitability—all the things that make up the business side of a franchise. But the smell is part of the shopper experience. And that is an aspect of a business that you shouldn’t overlook.
The Kid to Kid shopping experience is meant to resemble shopping at a regular retail store, which helps customers get over the negative connotations and feelings that may come with shopping at a resale shop. This allows the customer base to be much larger than a regular resale shop, which means a bigger success for Kid to Kid franchisees.
