Owners Tracey and Jeff Wills know store appearance matters to women customers.

At a time when most purveyors of postmastectomy products rent space in lower-cost strip malls, lease portions of pharmacies or clinics, or operate home-based businesses, Women’s Health Boutique flourishes in an Oklahoma City mall.

The decision to open her franchised business in a mall was a painstaking process, says Tracey Wills, a nurse who also owns a HME company. “I looked at strip centers, I looked at doing something inside a hospital or a medical complex, but this particular mall, in an upscale suburb, filled my needs,” she says.

She knew the part of the city she wanted to locate in, and from there researched the appropriate properties in the area. Once she found space in the covered, air-conditioned mall, she studied existing tenants, hours, and other selling opportunities that might arise by virtue of stores on either side of hers. Confident of her decision, 3 years ago Wills opened Women’s Health Boutique among a mix of three restaurants, a movie theater, and 30 small shops and stores.

“To the south of my store is an upscale shoe store, across the mall is a furniture store, and there’s a jewelry store here. They all are predominantly women-focused businesses. It’s a mall for women shoppers,” she says. However, it is not a prime retail mall. There are no major anchor stores like Foley’s or Dillard’s, nor are there any chains. Tenants are local independent businesses, many of them very boutique-like, which is precisely the nature of Wills’ business.

Demographic Choices
The decision to locate in this particular mall made sense when demographics revealed that the area around the mall had an older population with a median income greater than $100,000 per year. The mall is also located close to a number of assisted living facilities. This makes it feasible for Wills to market to a particularly receptive population. “We even got on the bus route,” she says, referring to the shuttles that bring assisted-living-facility residents to the mall.

Women’s Health Boutique caters to an older age group, which includes women who avoid driving long distances and who need wide turning lanes and large parking places. Before signing a lease, Wills considered the mall’s traffic pattern. The parking lot is on a corner and has an entrance with turning lanes that make for easier access. If there is a drawback to the location, it is that the shop has only a mall entrance, no outside door. Wills says she decided to compromise on that point because her shop is at least adjacent to a major mall entrance, eliminating a long walk through the mall for her customers.

Franchise’s experience helps
With 3,000 square feet to fill and an interior to design, Wills turned to the Women’s Health Boutique franchise for help. Together they came up with a decor that is similar to some of the new women’s health complexes—tasteful and elegant with plants, glass, and upscale fixtures. Advice on setting up the store’s physical layout included installing arches that break up the interior space. General retail products like maternity clothes, gifts for newborns, books, and skin care products are displayed on the mall side. Products that require more privacy—such as postmastectomy products—are located toward the back of the store.

Close to the front of the store, the prominent book section includes inspirational volumes; books about mothers, daughters, and sisters; and health-related books dealing with breast cancer survival, aging, and osteoporosis. You do not have to have cancer to find something there to read, Wills says, adding that mall shoppers often stop by without realizing the shop is mainly postmastectomy. That is fine with her, because “If you have breasts or know someone with breasts, you are a potential customer.”

Large bras and personal bra fitting for both mastectomy and nonmastectomy customers make an important contribution to the store’s bottom line. “[Personal fitting] is not something you get in a department store where often you cannot even find someone to wait on you,” Wills says.

Plus, serving cancer-free customers lets Wills spread the word about the importance of early detection for breast cancer. “We have a captive audience and we are here to do more than just sell. We are a resource.” American Cancer Society literature, including shower cards explaining the procedure for breast self-examinations, is given away with every purchase.

Behind an arch separating the front of the store from the back, customers find mannequins with wigs, hairpieces, and tasteful lingerie. Cancer patients who have lost their hair from chemotherapy buy some of the wigs, but what really turned wigs into an added profit center for Wills was the area’s older population, which includes women that may have alopecia (female balding) or want a wig just for fun.

The store’s three dressing rooms include one for maternity clients stocked with pregnancy and baby-related reading material. The other two fitting rooms are designed with maximum privacy for postmastectomy patients. A doorway opens from the retail section while a second entrance goes to the stock room. Once the customer is in the room, the salesperson uses the back door to go in and out for additional stock, assuring that modesty and privacy are never compromised.

Because dealing with cancer patients requires special sensitivity, staffing presented challenges. Currently, Wills employs two full-time salespeople and one part-time. Her first hires were nurses who had backgrounds in oncology but lacked retail and merchandising experience. Then she tried experienced retailers with no medical background. Neither was an optimum combination. Wills finally found an employee who had worked for an HME company in sales and marketing, and had experience with reimbursement. An understanding of contracts, getting authorization for precertifying patients, and billing, plus cosmetology certification, rounded out the perfect resume. A second employee, a breast cancer survivor with a background in retail lingerie, also is a cosmetologist.

Personal fitting and private dressing rooms appeal to many modest customers.

Wills says she has found that the most important traits in sales employees really cannot be quantified. “If I were to profile that person, I would look for someone who had retailing experience with a larger company,” she says. “On the other hand, any time you come up with someone who can truly relate to a woman who has had a cancer incident or experience, either personally or through someone close, that is optimal. [Noncancer survivors] can be empathetic, but we cannot truly say, ‘I know how you feel.’”

Not in Wills’ business plan were the emotional effects of watching her customers support and bond with each other. On any given day, three or four women could be involved in conversation. “One may have finished chemotherapy and her hair is just coming back, one could have walked in still shell-shocked from a new diagnosis and the prospect of surgery in 3 days, and another may have just gone through her first chemotherapy and is throwing up,” Wills says. “To watch them act as a support group for each other is remarkable.”

Other positive effects have come from being part of a franchise, especially when Wills stocks her shelves. She scours the Dallas Apparel Mart, plans to visit the Las Vegas Lingerie Mart, and travels to Medtrade, but her best buying opportunities come each year when the franchisor conferences with the 15 to 20 store owners. The franchise brings in vendors for an on-site trade show where the owners are assured personal attention and group buying privileges. “It is one of the main things that attracted me to the franchise,” Wills says. “Volume buying gives me a big enough price break to pay the franchise royalties.”

Help From Friends
At the annual meetings, Wills enjoys networking with other franchise owners, bouncing ideas off others, and sharing experiences so she can avoid making mistakes an independent might. Often she can also sell overstocks to another franchise owner who is in a market where sales for the overstocked product are better. “Going with a franchise puts you at least 3 years ahead of the game as compared with doing it on your own,” Wills says. “Yes, you pay royalties, but I guarantee you are getting a greater discount on the products because you have clout buying in bulk. Vendors who wouldn’t pay attention to you because you are not a national chain suddenly are courting you.”

Further franchise support comes from the Women’s Health Boutique Web site. Women may log on to www.w-h-b.com to find the closest boutique, learn about products, or participate in an online forum for women with special health issues. This sort of support would be cost-prohibitive if individual owners were to do it on their own.

Wills recently acquired two obstetric/gynecologic physicians as investment partners. Although they stay out of day-to-day operations, the physicians provide feedback and help guide overall business strategy. It has been a positive experience for Wills and she says her new partners seem to be having fun as well. “From a business standpoint, it is a way for them to diversify into something that has close parallels to what they do,” she says.

Although Wills admits that after only 3 years in business, she has yet to perfect her business model. She looks forward to opening more stores. “I think this is a really cool business,” she says. “It is a nontraditional sort of career. Those of us who are nurses and who own boutiques can bring something special to it.” She is already looking in other malls.

Judy Wade is a contributing writer for Dealer/Provider.