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More so than with many customer bases for your store, the potential for police business depends heavily on local market conditions. The local police department may be hiring, or may be letting officers go. In that case, the idea is to aim for existing business.

You could make a case either for servicing the police and security industries comprehensively, or on the other hand for carving out a niche by specializing in one area, such as accessories. The key is to make that specialty profitable, or, if the store has aimed at cornering the whole business, to justify doing so.

To serve those who protect and serve

To begin with, there are the product categories that must be represented.

In terms of clothing, that means shirts, outerwear, pants, headwear (ranging from dress hats to riot helmets), specialty socks, gloves, and boots and shoes.

All of these categories are multifaceted entities unto themselves. Footwear may be dress shoes or it may be tactical boots. As for pants, the store needs to find out what type or types the department favors. Comfort and breathability are also increasing priorities.

A good-sized police department may have one style of uniform for beat patrolmen, another for bicycle cops and still another for its SWAT team. Security personnel may wear clothes designed to give the visual impression of military or law-enforcement personnel, or they may wear a blazer and slacks. The one-size-fits-all approach has never been less effective.

The equipment that need to be stocked ranges from leather and nylon goods (e.g., equipment belts, holsters, light cases, and cuff cases) to hard goods such as handcuffs and batons, flashlights, safety vests and pepper spray or other less-than-lethal modes of protection. Several of these can cross over from police to security applications.

The store fully servicing a police market needs to pay attention to badges, as well as badge cases, belt badge holders, collar insignia, commendation bars and patches and pins. On many of these items, the store needs to provide customization and embroidery, which applies to security as well as police customers.

Both “police” and “security” are catch-all terms for workforces of increasing diversity in terms of responsibilities—and wardrobes. The tactical officer won’t have the same day-to-day requirements as a traffic cop.

A group effort

Catering to these markets means marketing to them effectively. With police departments, and to some extent with security operations, it entails successfully negotiating the ins and outs of reaching not individual personnel one on one but local and county government agencies, security firms and public and private organizations that maintain security forces.

“Perhaps the toughest obstacle a small business may face when going after local government contracts is understanding both the government procurement process and how to sell to the government,” according to Onvia, a Seattle-based company that provides electronic bid notification and government business intelligence to companies of all sizes. “Small businesses bypass thousands of dollars a year in local government contracts because they don’t know or fully understand all the components of the government procurement process.”

Onvia offers some tips on finding success in this arena, and while the advice is general, it also applies to retailers seeking to bid on police department contracts.