Doodah Snowboard & Skate, Swiss
Store – Doodah
Location – Switzerland
Website – http://doodah.ch/
What particular product has been the best seller? What’s working and what isn’t?
Vans Authentics, Bones Wheels and doodah draw string bags are the best selling products right now.
So hot: Tank Tops, Vintage & Canvas Backpacks, 5 Panel Caps, Woven prints
Nisch, nisch: Zip Hoodies, New Era Caps, Baggie Pants, Big Logos
What percentage of your sales are from online business compared to your brick-and-mortar sales?
We are doing our main sales in our brick-and-mortar stores.
What are five products you couldn’t live without right now?
Cruiser Boards, Freitag Bags, Casio Vintages Watches, Carhartt Acrilic Watch Beanie, Ping-pong rackets
Did your store’s sales increase or decrease over last year? To what do you attribute your gain or loss in sales? What will you do to either maintain your growth or to reverse the decline?
Last year our sales increased slightly.
We extended largely our own line of “doodah” products and had lots of positive feedback and encouraging numbers there. Also we invested in our shop design with new racks and light boxes to present the customer a clearer and cleaner image of our stores.
To maintain the positive trend, we will continue to work our ass off on a daily basis to keep our customers happy.
If you could go back five years what would you do differently?
That’s a tough question. We would have started a massive school campaign, that riding a scooter is definitely not cool!
What are the benefits of having a physical shop over simply having an online store?
We think the combination of the two channels gives the customers the best possible solution. The online side has a lot of convenient aspects, like browsing through options and easy ordering. But you can only get face to face advice and try on lots of different products if you move your ass from your couch to your shop.
What trends do you see upcoming?
Trucker Caps and Dr. Martens will come back.
People will mix even more different styles.
What are you doing to pull people into your store?
We try to offer the best possible assortment of products and host our customers and clients with a big smile in our shop. Besides that we try to give back as much as possible to the scene with contests, sponsoring events & team, parties, art exhibitions.
Please tell us of any upcoming initiatives your shop has planned?
We will launch more episodes of our current video format “doodah meets…” Expect some more surprise guests after our team met up with Nicolas Müller, Luke Mitrani and Christian “Hitsch” Haller.
We will hold a series of skate contests, stopping in the major Swiss cities. In our flagship store in Zurich we will host a HUF pop-up shop-in-shop and present the new additions to our brofessionals and artist skate deck series.
Also we’ll be present at all the big Swiss open airs and festivals with a booth – stay tuned for that!
How do you stay in touch with the wants and needs of your customers?
I guess living the dream every day and staying close to everyone involved. Hanging around the “hotspots”, where it’s happening, helps a lot too. So you’ll see us at the skatepark, on the mountain and raging in the clubs or you might catch us surfing on blogs.
How confident are you for the coming summer?
Our industry is slowly bouncing back and the first positive signs are already out there. This summer will be awesome!
What kind of advice can you give other independent retailers who are trying to compete against the big box megastores?
Big usually means slower. So we have to work with brands and trends before they’re getting milked by the big guys. The other advantage we have is a crew, who live what they are selling. That gives us core shops an authenticity, the mall Shops will never have.
