Richard Aylett, co-owner of The Card and Balloon Room, Makerfield in Aston creates beauty to fight the beast
“In the latest edition of Progressive Greetings I read with great sadness of yet another High St store closing down, this latest one being All Good Gifts of Battersea in London. Among others the reasons mentioned for the closure was the creeping impact of Amazon as well as major players opening up in close proximity.
Amazon is a major beast of the online world. I like a challenge, but indies need to know how to win against this giant – and it is not impossible!
I’m sure many bricks and mortar retailers invest money into a website with little or no return, one of the main problems with this of course is that unless you have a large pot of money you’re entering a very saturated market where it is even more dog eat dog than on the High Street. You can spend £1000’s on web maintenance and web advertising and also the all singing dancing ‘SEO’ which everyone and their dog claim they can improve for you, but again it will be throwing lots of coins down that money pit.
I think one thing that is often forgotten or maybe overlooked by indies is what makes their business unique and special in their community.
Far be it for me to tell people how to run their store, but while we do not get it right all the time – something happened in our store and our community this week which reinforced once again that us indies can protect and promote our businesses while engaging with our local community.
We do try to maintain our pecking order on the High St, and admittedly we’ve thrown lots of money at our website thinking that it would be the saviour of our business – it wasn’t! The saviour of our business has been earning customer loyalty by constantly being a part of the community so that when someone is looking for a card, gift or balloon in our town they think of us, despite the fact that we have lots of competition in our town, including the usual major players.
So how do we create customer loyalty and develop the business to hopefully take it forward? Well, besides great customer service we hold regular events especially during school holidays, and the thing that entices them is we make it free to all and importantly current.
Some five years ago I got our fellow traders together and suggested organising a series of ‘Trails’ around the town. Our annual Halloween Trail now attracts participating from over 1,000 children and their parents and we also have Easter and Christmas Trails.
This week as part of our ‘school holidays programme’, we have created special events, such as Princess and Pirate Days. Yesterday (August 9), building on the popularity of the Beauty and the Beast film and huge interest in the Disney Princesses, we arranged a ‘Come and meet Belle Day’, which was attended by over 200 children and their parents. These are not ‘selling’ days as in fact we actually lose money on these days, but we use these as our development days. In fact you could call them our ‘SEO’ days at ground level – the real coalface of retailing! We also got a local milkshake bar, Blend & Shake involved and they relished the opportunity to develop ‘The Belle Shake’ which went down a storm.
Yes, the big players will always be there and hopefully will always keep us on our toes, constantly challenging us to make the High Street a better place, and to look at our business time and time again. This really does us a favour as it’s making us focus even more on what we do and inspire us to do it better!
So my fellow retailers take a step back look at what you do and do it better and then just do it even better than that. Then, celebrate any great achievement by telling your local press by issuing a press release. In fact for the first six independent card and gift shops who manages to get their press release printed after reading this, send a copy of it into PG and I will personally send you a bottle of my favourite wine…It is holiday season after all!
