Should you give your customers a vote about the merchandise in your store? Consider this:
A recent article on
entrepreneur.com called
Vote For Art: Democratizing Collegiate Apparel, tells the story of a young entrepreneur named Jeremy Parker (he's 24-years-old) who has broken into the lucrative collegiate licensing category in the States in a unique way. VoteforArt.com partners with universities and colleges, and through it students at these institutions vote for T-shirt designs created by peers, which will, in turn, by sold in their campus stores. Parker's impetus for creating VoteforArt.com was his own visit to a university campus, where he couldn't find a T-shirt with a design he liked. Why not, he thought, combine crowdsourcing and licensing and let the people who actually purchase the merchandise do the designing and make the selection.
Reading the article, I wondered what other retail applications this "democratizing" might have. Would it be good business for a retailer in a tourist area to hold a T-shirt design contest and let customers determine the winning design? Could a customer vote help you narrow down your choices of product in any given category? Customers have always voted with their dollars but it's an after-the-fact vote. What would happen if they got to vote for something that you didn't yet carry in your store? Just an idea.