Watching the Numbers: How Tulsa Children's Museum Optimized Their Merchandise Sales

Guest Post from Susan Daubeneck, Tulsa Children's Museum:

We just launched our Merch Shop in January. Right now it’s a 7’ by 4’ wall display, with additional stock stored behind our front desk. We sell museum hats, t-shirts, and pencils as well as a few key science and creativity items. (Science Kits, Creativity Cans and Glux).



We checked out a few different price points, under $1, under $3, under $5, under $10 and under $20, including tax. By watching our reports, we realized under $10 was a really important price point for the organization and changed some of our purchasing habits and/or prices to offer the correct items to our guests.

By using Altru’s merchandise feature, we are able to keep vendor and pricing information easily accessible to the organization’s decision makers. The Merchandise Sales report clearly lays out the important details all in one place: quantity sold, gross sales, discounts, refunds, net sales, percent of sales, cost of sales, margin, profit and percent of profit.

We've also used Altru’s Merchandise feature to handle our auction item sales at our yearly gala. The reports have reduced our time preparing tax reports for that event.

Being able to load existing merchandise barcodes in the Altru system is one of our favorite features. It reduces our time prepping merchandise for sale, and gets us selling new merchandise quickly. We hope that our Merch Shop becomes a nice extra revenue source for the Discovery Lab.