Page 267 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

Being an ingenious person, this dressmaker sold her customers on having
their lingerie as well as their dresses made to order. She also encouraged
them to plan their needs for each season in advance, thus showing them how
to be well-dressed with a minimum of expense and time. This plan not only
helped her to organize her work, but also gave her extra work to do in fixing
over last season’s dresses for her customers.

She realized that unless she had ideas to offer her customers she would not be
able to plan their wardrobe, and she knew that was the secret of success in
this business. So she scanned the pattern books, looked at the new fabrics in
the better department stores, and also looked over the dresses sold by the
“stylish stout departments” in these stores. She brought samples of fabrics
home from the stores and mounted them on cards with the prices listed
beneath. Pictures of dresses made from patterns that she thought would make
up well for stout figures were also mounted on cards. Customers came to rely
more and more on her judgment as to style and good taste, which, of course,
made the work much easier for her to handle.

While most of this dressmaker’s work came to her through customers’
recommendations, some of it also came through a corsetiere who had a
number of stout women on her customer list. An agreement was made
between the two women to recommend each other to their customers—a plan
that worked to their mutual benefit.

Recently, she found another “market” making clothes for unusually tall
women. These women, like stout women, find it hard to be fitted in
readymade things and to make it more difficult, there are no special
departments in the stores which cater to their needs. Tall women need longer
sleeves, longer skirts, and often longer waists than the average figure
requires, so practically everything they buy has to be altered. This business
was a little harder to build up but it is slowly increasing, mostly through
“word-ofmouth” advertising by satisfied customers.

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