No one needs to tell Nancy Dennis about this influence. As the
43-year-old founder of the Toronto-based Ch!ckaboom girls'
retail clothing chain, Dennis, along with partners Glenn
Stonehouse, 49, and Arif Noor, 36, courts preteen consumers on a
full-time basis. Convinced there existed an underserved market--and
inspired by the success of Limited Too--Dennis opened the first of
two Ch!ckaboom stores in 1997.
"I saw Ch!ckaboom as going one step further than Limited
Too," Dennis explains. "We really make this a store for
[preteen girls]. We market to them, we talk to them, we serve them.
[We view the shopping experience] through their eyes."
To that end, Dennis and her young sales staff regularly sponsor
in-store events and contests geared toward the tween girl. Perhaps
Ch!ckaboom's most effective marketing tool, however, is the
company's birthday club--on their birthdays, each of the
3,000-plus names in Ch!ckaboom's database receives a card and a
$5 gift certificate. "These little girls aren't getting
mail," Dennis points out, "so when they get something
from Ch!ckaboom, they're thrilled."
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For her part, Bokram is struck by the strength of mail-order
catalogs such as the much ballyhooed Delia's--an upstart teen
clothier looking to take its winning formula to tweens. "For
most people, trying to reach this girl is like trying to market to
someone on Mars," Bokram says. "Delia's does a
wonderful job. It managed to build a business where there had been
nothing. No one was marketing to these girls on a catalog basis;
nobody thought it would work."
So much for conventional wisdom.