Retail merchants tap older market
by MARGIE FISHER
At a recent Stein Mart fashion show plenty of mature faces were featured both on the runway and in the audience. In fact, prominent in the audience were members of the Red Hat Society, a club for women who find aging a new chance to express themselves.
Stein Mart is one of the Roanoke area merchants that have found it good business to market to older shoppers.
Older Americans make up about a third of the population but control three-quarters of all personal assets, which amounts to about $1.6 trillion, according to Age Wave research group. Older Americans account for 80 percent of all luxury travel and more than 40 percent of new car sales.
Barbara Lippert of AdWeek magazine was quoted last fall by www.cbs.com as saying the “demographics have changed so much that 50-year-olds are living like 35-year-olds. They’re not putting themselves away. They’re not dying. And they’re going to have a lot of years with a lot money.”
Stein Mart sees an increase in sales after its fashion shows, said Van Stella Kerfoot, who at 67 was one of the models at the retailer’s recent show at the Patrick Henry Hotel in Roanoke.
Kerfoot defies the outmoded stereotypes of “senior citizens” as decrepit, inactive, poor and no longer mindful of how they look.
Where these older women might once have been expected to wear dowdy black dresses and clunky shoes, now—like Kerfoot—they are more likely to be beautifully coifed and brightly adorned in the latest styles.
With more discretionary income, many mature women can better afford not only to spoil their grandkids but to spoil themselves a bit, too—much more than their mothers and grandmothers could have afforded. They are buying more clothes, more jewelry, more makeup, more manicures, pedicures and coiffures, more time with personal trainers at the gym and more airline tickets to exotic places where they can show off their good looks and purchases.
Stein Mart, John Norman Clothiers and Christy’s Apparel & Accessories, to mention a few, have tapped the burgeoning buying power of today’s older woman.
Van Stella Kerfoot is the perfect sales-ma’m for many merchants, including the above-mentioned, who want to cultivate the 50-plus market. She has been a featured model at fashion shows in Roanoke for almost 50 years. Her first gig (then as teen-ager Van Stella Kingery) was at Hotel Roanoke in a fashion show sponsored for Smartwear-Irving Saks.
Kathy Surace, who directs the shows for Stein Mart, said she looks for models who wear clothes well, not so much at the age of the person.
Pat Talton, an advertising veteran who finds models for advertising agencies, said she knows how energetic seniors can be because at age 68, she’s one of them.
“I’ve retired several times only to come right back to work,” she said.
Talton said the requests for older models have increased, but most of the requests have to do with services directly related to aging such as retirement facilities.
Jamie Cohan, who also scouts models for advertising projects in the Roanoke area, said she doesn’t get many requests for older models.
In a larger community such as New York where she formerly worked, she said she believes awareness of the older market is greater.
It’s not that all businesses aren’t aware of older consumers, said Steve Davis of Grand Home Furnishings. Some retail businesses just target their promotions toward their broadest markets. In home furnishings, for example, research indicates Grand’s main market is consumers ages 25-54, said Davis, vice president and director of advertising.
However, as one of the over-50 group, Davis said he is sensitive to that group of consumers. Grand does send direct mail to ZIP codes where retirees cluster, such a Smith Mountain Lake, and it also tries to contact anyone who changes residences in the area, which likely catches some of the people downsizing.
But for its main marketing thrust, Grand aims for the middle, he said.
“In the rare instances where Grand uses models in its print and television ads, we try to not pick someone too young or too advanced in years,” Davis said.
Margie Fisher is a Roanoke freelance writer.
Some information for this story was supplied by Sandra Brown Kelly.
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