If you want to keep your boutique afloat, you are going to have to make some major changes in the way you have been doing things and in the inventory you keep in your stores.

Enter the last five years as the economy first stumbled and then fell flat on its face. Suddenly disposable cash became food money as jobs started to disappear or pay less.

Today things are not quite so rosy as the economy is still in a tailspin and unless things change dramatically, the future is not looking very good for the average high fashion boutique stores.

It was far more important that you worried about having the latest fashions and top names in the business, cost was not something that you had to pay too much attention to.

It has made the buyers for these stores far more aware of what they are buying, how much they keep in their inventory and most importantly how much they are willing to pay for the clothing and fashion accessories they are buying.

No matter what the cost of the clothing lines they were buying was, it was simply passed on to the consumer. Today most consumers have become far more aware of their money or lack of it and have become much more savvy buyers.

There was a time when the fashion boutique could afford to buy from most suppliers and simply pass the cost on to their customers who were more than happy to pay the price of looking beautiful in the latest fashions.