Design Dress Codes Deliberately

Desmond Morris, whose career work is central to the field of evolutionary psychology, wrote, “It is impossible to wear clothes without transmitting social signals. Every costume tells a story, often a very subtle one, about its wearer. Even those people who insist that they despise attention to clothing, and dress as casually as possible, are making quite specific comments on their social roles and their attitudes towards the culture in which they live.”
     …and their attitudes towards the culture in which they work.
     Employee dress standards are part of the service we offer customers. But dress standards are tricky for retailers. A Bloomberg Businessweek article acknowledges the confusion by reporting results from an employee survey sponsored some years ago by the now-defunct department-store chain Mervyn’s: About 90% of the surveyed workers couldn’t describe the differences among formal business attire, business casual, and just plain casual.
     Take a leadership role in deliberatively designing dress codes for your stores, offices, warehouses, and outside sales teams. Think through the functions that dress serves for you and incorporate those in the standards. In that way, you can best answer questions about the standards.

• Functional. Whatever the employee is wearing, they probably can put on coveralls to unload boxes or put on gloves and kneepads to clean up spills. But rugged, well-fitting shoes might be essential for workplace safety, even if the shoes look clunky.
• Show off the merchandise. This applies to more than clothing stores. Customers will give greater credibility to the merchandise in a medical supply store when the staff wear white jackets and greater interest in cooking utensils when demonstrated by somebody wearing a chef’s toque.
• Reinforce the business’s code of behavior. For a time, the British Broadcasting Corporation was getting static for allowing female newsreaders to show lots of leg and the men to wear turned-up jeans. Older audience members recalled that when Lord Reith was in charge, even the newsreaders on radio had to wear dinner suits. The objective was to give the newsreading the proper gravitas. What’s the personality you want to project with your dress code? High or low gravitas? It’s how the clothing style makes the wearer feel. It’s also the nature of the clothing styles the employees see as they look around at each other.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

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