Business can be a lonely game, but it doesn't have to be.

Welcome to Boutique Chat, where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek.

We'll hear from product-based businesses of all types, retailers, e-commerce, and wholesale brands,

along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson

from the boutique hub, and I can't wait to chat.

Hi, guess what? I get asked this question all the time or actually I shouldn't even say that.

I don't get asked this question. It's more so when I get asked the question, why is my business not

working? Or I've been doing this. I feel like I'm getting nowhere. Or I have a brick and mortar

and I'm trying to grow my online business and no one is

buying, right? Those are the struggle questions I get asked all the time. And then when I investigate

a little bit further to try to help these people and answer this question and I dig in and

maybe I go visit their social media account or I hop on over their website just to kind of see

what I see.

What I find is a bunch of stock photos.

I find a website full of the exact same girl that came from a bunch of LA vendors five years ago.

Or I see just some very boring, unmerchandized, all different sizes, stock photos, or I see stock photos that everyone in their mother has gotten from the latest drop shipper. And so when I come

back to answer this question, the stock photos make a huge difference in why a boutique is or isn't

successful. And there's a bit of the difference here between apparel and home and gift.

So I'm going to get to that in just a minute.

But let me speak to apparel first.

If you are in the apparel industry, one of the biggest reasons why you don't want to use stock photos is you literally look like everyone else.

There is no way to differentiate your brand from anyone else using that wholesaler, that drop shipper,

...