Choosing your assortment

The choice of assortment is one of the things that tells people who you are fastest. A coherent, legible assortment immediately says what your business model is and what your values are, and lets people understand in a few seconds whether yours is the right optical practice for them.

Having an original assortment does not mean going for extreme design pieces, which require specific preparation and speak to a few. You can offer an interesting product, cared for in its details, with a personality of its own, and at the same time wearable and of good quality.

The point is not being strange. It is having something to say, and knowing how to say it well.

The originality of a practice does not come from the most unusual frames it can find, but from the coherence with which it chooses them: from the fact that, put together, those frames tell a position, not just a catalogue. It is the same lesson that comes from the market, from the courage to narrow down of Jacques Marie Mage to the boutique that Piero Massaro talks about, and it applies to the way the space presents them too: visual merchandising for the optical practice.

Choosing the assortment is a strategy decision, not a matter of taste: it starts from who you want to serve and shows in the numbers. It is one of the themes we work on with Trade Up in Italy and The Charismatic Practice elsewhere, and one I described as an area of the Optical Retail Marketing Wheel in the book Il Centro Ottico Carismatico.