Actually that shirt does not look good on you….

Last week I had a man with bright red hair come into my store and tried on quite a few Hawaiian shirts. He was going on a first date with a new girl and they were going to a luau down in Pacific Beach. As he tried on shirt after shirt ,he kept asking my opinion about which ones looked the best on him. After trying several shirts he picked our Red Panel Hawaiian shirt and it is really bright red with beautiful yellow plumeria's on a vertical panel design.

The problem was this bright red shirt combined with his carrot red hair just didn’t go together. Here at the Wave Shoppe I have a lot of men come into the store shopping and if they don’t have a wife in tow I am the one they ask “does this look good on me”. 

A long, long time ago I decided I didn’t just want to sell them “any” shirt but sell them a shirt that looks good on them so sometimes I have to be brutally honest so I looked this customer in the eye and said “I would like to offer you my honest opinion that Hawaiian shirt clashes with your hair” He looked at me and said “Well I thought so too but I was going to see if you said it looked nice just to sell a shirt”

So we both started laughing and he asked me to pick the one I would pick for my husband if my husband was unfortunate enough to be a carrot top. So I picked our black traditional Hawaiian shirt with white vertical hibiscus flowers. It toned down his hair and he looked good in that shirt.

I guess the moral of this story is as a merchant do you want to just sell a shirt, or sell a shirt that looks good on your customer?