Sophisticated Sell

The design team's creativity is matched by its focus on fit. Wurtzburger has led a huge effort over the past two years to get fit right. She introduced a quarterly ritual called a "fit party," where real customers "shop" a makeshift store, try on outfits, and pour out their comments, complaints, and pain to a range of Anthropologie staffers. One outcome of the fit party is a private-label line of pants, called Flying Room, for women with "a larger hip-to-waist ratio." Flying Room has been flying off the shelves.

After fit, it's mix that fuels the success of Anthropologie on every level: "We sell an incredible amount of ethnic, an incredible amount of preppy, and an incredible amount of pretty," says Wurtzburger. "We manage that balance. We also manage the balance between basics and novelty. We're always looking at balance by concept, balance by color, balance by weight, balance by fabric."

That mix -- and the ability to move it -- isn't just an aesthetic at Anthropologie's stores; it's also a rewarding strategy for the business as a whole. "We measure success in a different way," says Johnson. "We love to have big numbers on things. But we're also happy to have fringe items that are very evocative. We know it won't set the world on fire, but it's something that will make a big difference in the store. What we're trying to do is not think of individual items as make-or-break, but to think about the overall aesthetic. A small part of the assortment might not sell very well, but it could add tremendously to the aesthetic of the store. That's a win. If we had only best-sellers in the store, that would be very boring. There's nothing more boring than last year's big win."

Sidebar: Anthropologie 101

Not surprisingly for a business named after an academic discipline (and then translated into French!), a visit to Anthropologie's home office in Philadelphia can feel like a graduate seminar in the semiotics of trade. But it's precisely the combination of intellectual rigor with an intuitive ear for the customer that makes for such compelling selling. What follows is a cheat sheet of Anthropologie's central disciplines and some of its tricks of the trade.

Your Fieldwork Never Ends If you really want to understand your customer, you have to spend a portion of your time excavating the creative edge of the culture that defines her. For Anthropologie president Glen Senk, that means lurking around upscale neighborhoods, looking for blue plastic New York Times delivery bags and calculating the ratio of Starbucks to convenience stores. For found-objects buyer Keith Johnson, that can mean four-to-eight-week treks across multiple continents in search of new sources of inspiration. "It's important," he says, "to go to the source: great museums, antique stores, cultural events, and farther afield. I will absolutely go down any alleyway that looks like it might lead to a discovery."

Name Everything The Anthropologie merchandising mix is so dynamic, richly layered, and dense with references that it's hard to keep it straight. In the buying department, each season's collection is organized into three companywide categories (feminine, ethnic, and modern) that are then refined and named at the department level. The feminine line of bedding for Fall 2003 is called "Estella." In the visual department, visual director Kristin Norris concocts names for every vignette -- Angels & Insects, The Collectors -- for internal use.

Don't Forget Feedback "The Anthro Dig" is a weekly newsletter published on the intranet that features success stories, product highlights, $1,000-plus sales, PR of the week, celebrity shopping. Good Idea Sheets are one-sheet forms that any person can send to the home office. Sales associates send ideas about customer service, store experience, and product fit to the home office; Norris attaches a picture of the best execution of a merchandising concept or visual "story" and sends it around to every store's visual team.

Get Personal Anthropologie's designers and buyers constantly draw inspiration from far-flung sources. But sometimes the best ideas are closer to home. After 40 years without picking up a brush, Polly Dickens's mother started painting when her husband died. "It turns out she's a great painter," says Dickens, design director of home furnishings. "She did a great series of chickens, which I sent to be made into table linen. It's been the number-one table linen collection for months."