Material Wealth - It's a good thing!

Leah Hope from WLS news, the local ABC affiliate, visited our flagship store in Evanston today. She is working on a piece for the Monday night news at 10:00 pm on Channel 7.  I won’t give away the angle of the story, but her thoughtful questions got me thinking about business and the shift in marketing strategies these past few years as well as what drives the market.

For example, home improvement companies have been focusing on the DIY crowd. Ace Hardware continues to be the “Helpful Place” and is really driving home the point that you can do it yourself.    Lowes reassures customers they will find what they want and need with help from their knowledgable staff with the tag line “Experience. Lowes. Let’s Build Something Together.”  These changes possibly can be attributed to the popularity of home improvement shows such as ABC’s Extreme Makeover – Home Edition, as well as any number of shows on HGTV, coupled with the necessity to save money.

Over the past few years you may have seen some of our new slogans. For decades we have been using “America’s Premier Fabric Store.”  More recently we have introduced a slogan to drive the point home that Vogue Fabrics offers an incredible selection of items for the Do-It-Yourselfer: “1,000,000 Garments in Stock…TOTAL Assembly Required.” In response to this, we received a Tweet on Twitter that exclaimed “Best. Slogan. Ever!” (Thanks!)

With people looking for fabric sources online, it is reassuring to new customers to discover we have been in business for 65 years. Keeping that in mind, we introduced another popular slogan that taps into that as well as reaching out to the vast nation of fabric lovers (hoarders???): “Vogue Fabrics – Enabling Fabriholics since 1945.”  We even have this slogan superimposed over a drawing of a fashionable woman I lovingly refer to as Miss Cody Pendent.  Let’s face it, if you sew, you have a storeroom full of fabrics, notions, trims and scraps “that I might use one day!”  Many of you even own a t-shirt, coffee mug or poster that declares “She who dies with the most fabrics wins!” (Feel free to post below if you have such an item at home).

In this day and age of “I want it now!” sewing is a way to take pride in a process that involves time and effort. Sewing is like cooking and baking. You can go to the store to buy a cake, but baking a cake for your mom’s birthday gives you a sense of personal fulfillment. It comes from the heart.  Great job, people! Remember, sometimes “Material Wealth” is what you make of it.  I look forward to going through my wealth of material and making lots of new clothes for the winter!

I will post Leah Hope's story soon here and on Facebook if WLS puts it on-line.