Promotions are a great way to create excitement around your fabric store.
By running a promotion, you can accelerate sales, clear out old inventory, and build customer loyalty — but managing promotions effectively takes more than just marking down fabric prices. By coming up with a variety of ideas and testing them out, you can decide which ones are most effective for your customers and continually refine your strategy.
In this blog, we’ll explore eight promotion ideas that can help you fill your fabric store with customers and boost sales.
Let’s get started.
Seasonal fabrics are a popular choice for quilting enthusiasts, who enjoy using them to make quilts, pillows, decorations, and other projects. You can stock fabrics featuring designs for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween, or Christmas. Hosting a seasonal sale at your fabric store and promoting it to your customers inspires them to take on these kinds of projects.
You can choose to discount only seasonal fabrics, or offer storewide fabric discounts on a specific day or during certain times of the year. To advertise seasonal promotions like this, create flyers or posters to place around your store, and send text and email messages to let customers know about the sale.
A point of sale (POS) system helps you manage promotions like these. With a modern POS system, you can schedule discounts for specific time periods. To keep your customers informed, you can automate your marketing communications, too.
Related Read: 7 Sewing Trends You Need To Know in 2025
If some of your holiday inventory didn’t sell during its season, you have two options: store it until next year, or run a clearance sale to move it at a heavily discounted price. Keep in mind, clearance sales aren’t only for outdated seasonal fabric. For a variety of reasons, some fabrics just don’t sell as well as others, and clearance sales help you offload this stubborn inventory.
A POS system tracks which products are selling the most — and which ones are falling behind. This helps you identify slow-moving inventory that can go on clearance. You can also use a POS system to measure the effectiveness of your clearance sales. If not enough inventory is moving, you may need to mark prices down further or advertise more heavily.
A bundle is a set of two or more products sold together, usually for a discounted price compared to each item on its own. Bundles are a great way to motivate customers to make a larger purchase by offering a better value.
At a fabric store, you can create bundles with:
Bundles help you sell more fabrics and other products you offer. With a POS system, you can easily advertise these bundles by sending personalized messages to your customers.
Related Read: 12 Essential Cross-Selling and Upselling Strategies for Fabric Shops
Buy one, get one (BOGO) promotions are very popular with customers because, like bundles, they add more value than a standard purchase. When a customer buys one item, they get another one either free or discounted.
This promotion is best for items that customers tend to buy in higher quantities. At a fabric store, you might offer a BOGO deal on fabric or thread. By using a POS system, you can easily set up BOGO promotions, customize the rules, and apply them to the products you choose.
Loyalty programs offer additional value that motivates people to choose your fabric store over a competitor. Customers make purchases, and with each one, they earn points, punches, or another form of value, which can eventually be redeemed for rewards. These rewards may come as free, discounted, or exclusive products.
To create an effective loyalty program, offer rewards that are appealing enough to make customers want to participate. If the benefits are too minimal, they may lose interest. You also need to make sure the program is easy enough to understand. If the process is too confusing, customers don’t know how close they are to their next reward — and then they’re less motivated to earn it.
A POS system can help you track loyalty points and manage rewards, making it easier to offer a loyalty program and ensuring your customers don’t miss out on their benefits. These systems also offer customer relationship management (CRM) features, allowing you to track purchase histories and make better recommendations to individual customers.
Related Read: 6 Ways To Use Your Quilt Shop CRM To Delight Customers
Flash sales run for a limited time and feature significantly reduced prices. These sales create a sense of excitement and urgency, encouraging customers to stop by your fabric store and make a purchase. They can be useful for moving inventory that’s been sitting on shelves for a while and making room for new stock.
Effective flash sales are brief, meaning they run for a day or two. If they last too long, customers aren’t as motivated to buy something quickly and can lose interest in the next flash sale you offer. It’s important to advertise these sales immediately, too. With a POS system, you can quickly send personalized text and email messages to make customers aware of the great deals you’re offering.
Referral programs incentivize your customers to tell their family and friends about your fabric store. If a customer refers someone to your store, and the person they referred makes a purchase, the referrer earns a reward, which could be a discount, a free product, or store credit. Referrals are effective because customers are more likely to trust what their friends and family say about a business than what a business advertises about itself.
You can track referrals by using a POS system. When a referred customer mentions the name of their referrer, you can record it in your system to ensure the referrer receives their reward.
Hosting a contest on social media is a great way to engage your customers. You can challenge your customers to create a certain kind of project — like a blanket, quilt, or home decoration — or to make something using a certain type of fabric.
Ask them to submit their entries by posting them to their social media stories and tagging your fabric store, which makes it easy to sort through submissions. Let them know the winner of the contest will receive a prize — usually a free item from your store.
You can either select a winner at random, or choose your favorite entry to win the prize. Be sure to post the winner of the contest on your fabric store’s social media account at the close of the contest. A contest like this gives customers a chance to showcase their projects and boosts interaction with your store’s social media account, which increases brand visibility.
Related Read: 6 Social Media Marketing Ideas To Promote Your Quilt Shop
Promotions increase interest in your fabric store and accelerate sales. They’re also a great way to move outdated inventory, like seasonal items that are past their time of year. As you plan promotions, think bigger than just marking down prices. Be creative and try a variety of promotions.
Consider these eight promotion ideas:
As you put these promotion ideas into practice, pay attention to your sales numbers. Based on your customers, some of these offers can be more effective than others. Determine which promotions are most effective and create a customized promotion strategy that works for your fabric store.
Luckily, a POS system helps you make the most of promotions and discounts. Like Sew is an all-in-one, cloud-based POS solution designed specifically for fabric stores.
It’s equipped with both general retail and fabric-specific features, including fractional yardage and access to a catalog of fabric suppliers. You can easily implement customized pricing, limited-time discounts, and other promotions, too. With Like Sew, you have everything you need to increase sales for your business.
To see what Like Sew can do for your fabric store, schedule a demo today!