Dear Mavens!HOORAY - today feels great. We are a full team at SOUTHWOOD today and we are all feeling energised. We have been brainstorming ideas and thinking really hard about our retail side of the business. Retail has been pretty tough of late across the board and if you are lucky enough to have not felt the pinch I salute you.So today I thought we would share some of the things we were talking about. We thought you may find them useful too. If you have any tips for us we would love to hear them too!We know that our shoppers fall into two categories in general. Our shoppers are what you call 'Style leaders' and 'Trend followers'. We know we need to give our shoppers more inspiration and I will be concentrating on this in the coming months via my website. Photography is so important and although the product images supplied are usually good quality we want to inspire our shoppers further. We understand that our trend spotter shoppers like lots of choice and smaller items that they can pop into their basket.It is really important to think about packaging and gift wrap etc. We always pop a hand written hand note in with our orders. Think hard about your social media platforms. Does it represent your shop window. Ask a few people to describe what they see We love the new facility that allows us to tag products on instagram and that has been a bit of a game changer for us here.Good images on your instagram are so important. I always use my phone for my images as I only use the photos on social media and don't print them or anything. Lighting is really important and makes such a difference to your images. I really like to get as much daylight as possible. Shaneen does amazing iPhone workshops and I am hoping she will be doing more in the future.Have a great week ! Love Hayley xx