BUYER’S FORUM

The Lost Frames

Recovering from a robbery shows the value of meaningful inventory—and good alarms—for a successful shop

alex Feldman, founder and CEO of Daas Luxury Optics, has three showrooms, a flagship in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter and two additional locations in the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Studio City and Larchmont Village. Recently, one of his shops was robbed, leaving him with severely depleted inventory. Here he shares the story of the crime and recovery, as well as some advice for other shops.

eb: How has retail theft affected your shop?

af: With much of our inventory missing, we had to fill our boards with whatever we could to at least make the store look like it had merchandise until we were able to get restocked by our vendors.

But even with the shelves filled, our collections looked scattered and didn’t tell the stories of the brands we carried. This significantly hurt sales, as the merchandising didn’t allow customers to get excited about the product we have. We have had several brands restock us already, but after a month, several of our brands are still low as they are limited products with long delivery times.

This experience strongly reinforces my belief about the importance of proper merchandising. Even some of our top-selling brands are temporarily barely moving because of lack of proper selection—not enough styles on the board and not enough color options for the models that are still here.

eb: How has your recovery progressed?

af: We were able to get back into operation by the second half of the following day, but the recovery process is still moving along. We have been reordering with our vendors to replace inventory and some of it is already in, while much of it will still take more time to arrive.

eb: How are you moving forward to prevent future robberies?

af: We have greatly improved our security system in the store to help prevent this from happening in the future. A big issue is that if anyone gets in, it takes some time for the alarm company to notify you that your alarm was triggered. My company usually took anywhere from one to three minutes to contact me (which seems to be common), but the burglars are already gone before you or the police are notified. This is ridiculous, and in this case they didn’t call me until five minutes after our alarm triggered!

Watching the timing of events, if they had notified me right away like they should have, we possibly would have caught the burglars in action.

GOOD ADVICE

EB: WHAT WOULD YOU TELL OTHER OPTICALS IN TERMS OF STAYING SAFE OR BEING PREPARED FOR THE WORST?

AF: While our store is almost impossible to break into, our weak link turned out to be our neighbor. They broke into their store and cut through the wall to get into ours. Know your neighbor and make sure they are properly secured. Reinforce any potential access points and make sure your motion detectors are positioned for maximum coverage.

Also, double-check your alarm company by testing your system. If they take more than 15 to 20 seconds to alert you, then it’s pointless to even have them. I found a security system from a company called Vivint that gives me 100% control of my security system and all of its sensors, etc., all the time from anywhere. And the second my alarm system triggers, I get notifications with no delay and the monitoring company loops into the store and monitors and alerts the police instantly of the activity. I’m happy to share more details with any other opticians who are interested, feel free to contact me, alex@daasluxury.com.