The consumer is coming back

Sales for the first quarter are significantly above last year and our customer count continues to expand as more and more people turn to the off price industry to profit in this down economy. We have seen an increase in traffic at both the ASD show and the Off Price show as well as our walk in traffic. Many of our customers are reporting higher sales figures and while no one is telling us that business is great, we are hearing that business is improving and the consumer is returning to purchase new apparel items for the spring season. The warmer weather during the day has driven tee shirt sales and the cooler weather in the early morning and late evening continues to drive sales in fleece products. The demand remains strong for value items and in particular any liquidation item or reduced price item. Many of our customers are using our closeout items to increase margins by mixing in some of the lower cost products and thereby reducing the average cost in the overall mix. This trend has been growing all month and we are constantly looking to find additional items that we can mark down to improve our customers returns. The closeouts we have are constantly updated as items sell out and new items are added to the mix. Look for the white tank tops Style 2200G and the white shooter shirts Style 2700G to be sold out in the not to distant future. You can view these styles by clicking on the style number links. On the Internet front we have improved our servers and the speed on the site seems to improved dramatically. We will be upgrading our software in the month of April and I am sure we will have some issues but overall we think the new software will help our staff to able to operate with greater ease and functionality. We hope the new software will bring a much needed improvement to customers and sales staff while they try to sort through our ever growing product mix. Look to see a greater availability in children's products in April and hopefully a larger availability in adult white tee shirts. New inventory in white tee shirts will be available by April 1st.

Can anyone say twitter

The hottest buzz words on the web are "social networking" and although this has been on the web for years with web sites like My Space and Face Book a new start up company has created a environment that seems to be what everyone is looking for. The new start up is twitter.com founded in 2006 and it is the third largest social network behind Face book and My Space. With social networking being the next craze RG Riley has added twitter to our web site. We hope that our community of subscribers, customers, distributors and vendors will be able to use the social networking structure to make the off price community more transparent by answering questions and providing updates on product trends and availability. We think it would be really cool if someone in Arizona could benefit from a hot tip from a customer in Florida. Currently our twitter environment is open to anyone although we may think about restricting the visibility in the not to distant future. We look forward to your tweets and we will answer them as quickly as possible....

RG Riley

Irregular apparel Irregular t-shirts

Whats hot is closeout and Irregular T-shirts. With price increases being seen at all the major manufacturers wholesale irregular t-shirts are one hot commodity. We are seeing very strong demand for white tee shirts and color tee shirts in either graded irregulars or first quality closeouts. The demand for white tee shirts seems to out stripping the supply and is forcing prices higher on both the irregular category as well as the first quality category. We are seeing strong demand for white tee shirts in girls (see style K7520) , in ladies in both Cotton Spandex (see style 92700) and in 100% cotton jersey (see style bs190) and in men's (see style A3081). The weather remains cool across most of the US and with tee shirts being this hot this early we believe we will have one of the better years in Off price T-shirts and Irregular t-shirts. Make sure you view our selection of T-shirts by size and our assorted size short sleeve T-shirts.