Make a top shop: Pocket Clothier tips, hints and guides

Will you manage the next Topshop, or does your vision consists more of a dirt cheap Primark sort of experience? Pocket Clothier will separate the fashionistas from the "buy the first thing you grab"-ers.

Kairosoft's latest release is pretty wonderful, and has a serious amount of depth to it that you may not be fully aware of.

Pocket Gamer is here to sift through the racks of content and tell you exactly what you should be focusing on.

Looking to climb the ranks, satisfy your customers and have queues stretching out of the doors? Read on and be enlightened.

One element of Pocket Clothier that isn't explained so well is stock ordering. Partway through play, you may notice your shelves and racks begin to look a little empty and worse for wear.

This is because you need to manual alter your stock intake to meet demand. It's not so obvious how to do this, but it's actually pretty simple. From the main shop view, swipe over to the left-hand screen to see how much of each clothing range you have out on the shop floor and in backstock.

If you touch any clothing line, you'll see the Auto Stock menu. Initially, it is set to order ten more stock every time the inventory is below ten. This will quickly not be enough to satisfy your influx of customers as you progress.

The easiest way to fix this is to simply bump both numbers up by five every time your stock is looking low. For example, we bumped both figures up to 10/10, then when it looked like stock was constantly getting low again, we bumped it up to 15/15. Keep repeating this to keep your stock levels positive.

And don't forget to build Storerooms to keep backstock in. You can build these "tenant" rooms in larger spaces, and we found that building two Storerooms allowed us to keep enough backstock to always satisfy demand.

Seasonal sales

Every so often, one particular brand will become "the next big thing" - meaning that all your shoppers will be clamoring to get their hands on any clothes from that company.

When this is about to happen you'll be given the nod that it's probably a good time to stock up. Whenever a brand becomes popular, you can't buy stock of that brand anymore so stocking up beforehand is essential.

Go back to the left-hand stock page and select a brand by that company. Then hit "Additional Order". Now hit the arrow to the left or right of the clothing name and it will switch to show the entire brand name instead.

This will allow you to order extra stock for every single line from that company, setting you up nicely for the big sale. If you are worried about buying too much stock, don't be - you'll easily sell it all afterwards if you order too much, so go nuts.

Every now and again, you'll be able to build new floors. However, there are multiple types of floors, and while the star rating appears to show that the most expensive is the best, this isn't the case.

What you actually need is a good mixture of floors, with space for normal racks, space for bigger tenant fixtures, and a stage for special events to occur.

We'd suggest going with a mixture of tenants and normal fixtures for the majority of the floors, and plump for the stage floor higher up the building. That way, when you have an event, the shoppers who attend may then buy something on the way down to the ground floor.

Also remember that you will be offered extra entrances to your store later in the game, so don't base your layout on the idea that your shoppers are all going to enter through the ground floor.

Medals are the key to expanding the quality of your wares and staff. Medals can be spent on upgrading your staff experience, and also on purchasing new clothing lines.

They are hard to come by at the start of the game, so you'll want to aim to buy specific elements that will help you earn more - namely, tenants. Various tenants, such as the toilets, will earn you plenty of medals.

Medals can also be earned through events (so make sure you build a stage) and Plans - customers will run a "hurdles" race and find medals for you along the way. So make sure you partake in all the Plans that pop up.

They can also be earned through your staff helping out customers, but to be honest this doesn't happen very often. It's best to focus on the tenants.

Pocket Clothier is the first Kairosoft game to have "Awards", which are essentially the equivalent of Game Center achievements, except they actually give you cash and points in the game.

You'll get the majority of these through simply playing for a long time, but one string you'll want to watch is the profits trophies. Make sure you never, ever go into the red if you want to bag all of these.

As with other Kairosoft games, there are special "Compatible" fixtures - i.e. fixtures that, if placed next to each other, will boost the shop's popularity. Make sure you check out the "Compat." menu through the Info tab to see which work together.

You can also alter the Shop Policies through the Shop tab. We'd suggest leaving the price settings unless you really know what you're doing. However, in the Cleaning Crew tab, stick it up to <80 to keep your maximum Cleanliness rating high.