Industry: Buying Groups View from the industry


Independents are sticking by tried-and-tested brands, so says STAG’s Ricky Chandler.


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s if retailers did not have enough to contend with these days, many were up through the night recently protecting their properties from mindless looters when riots spread across many of our large cities.


The reasons behind this, causes and the solutions have all been debated long and hard, but there is only one statement that can be agreed by all and that is that ‘this was totally wrong, illegal and should not have happened in a civilised society’. I for one was completely embarrassed. So if as a sports retailer you managed to avoid being affected by the riots, you have had the British weather to contend with along with the tough trading conditions that we are all so used to hearing about and are experiencing.


How do you manage? Well we are seeing many of our members cutting back on large forward orders and picking up stock on a monthly or weekly basis. They are putting their money into tried-and-trusted brands with products that they know will produce a good sell-through. This is not the time to take gambles.


Many suppliers are seeing this change in buying patterns and are adjusting their business accordingly. Those suppliers that are having the most success with the independents at present are those who have well trained dedicated sales forces that constantly knock on doors to gain that crucial immediate order. We are also seeing a number of new businesses opening, with great business plans and in good locations so the regeneration of the independent sports industry is continuing.


We are lucky in these tough times that we are part of an


industry that is still in consumer demand.


The STAG 2011 Buying Show is once again fully


booked and will see exhibitors including Asics, Hi-Tec, Puma, Mizuno, McDavid, Canterbury, Reydon, Zoggs, Ronhill, New Balance, K-Swiss, JanSport and Terra Plana to name a few. New exhibitors to the show include Helly Hansen, Joma, Falke, Eden, Cybertill, Grangers and 2XU. Also new to the show is business guru Nicholas Bate. He will be speaking to members and exhibitors at the show on the Sunday. Bate is an author, designer and pioneering ‘thought leader’ in business and helping people ensure their true and full potential.


The show takes place November 20-21 at the Four Pillars Cotswold Water Park.


Ricky Chandler STAG director


Tech Tips: ‘It’s easy to use’


In the first of a series of briefings, Top to Toe director Michael Bloom explores the reality beneath the sales hype and talks about what makes a stock management system easy to use.


Part of the answer is to recognise what makes the sports trade special – sizes and colours. Most of the clothing and footwear items stocked are not just isolated items. Each shirt or pair of shoes is a stock keeping unit (SKU) in its own right, but each size/colour combination is part of a product range that is composed of many different sizes and colours. So each size/colour combination is separate but also part of greater whole. If a product comes in four colours and 10 sizes then that’s 40 different SKU combinations.


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All this is well known, but its consequences might not be so obvious. If a stock management system requires you to create


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t’s easy’ is a claim anyone can make but how can you tell when it’s more, or less, true?


each SKU separately then that’s a long, long job per product. At a minute for each size/colour it’s 40 minutes; even with some kind of copy and edit facility to make all 40 different size/colour combinations for just one product could take 10-15 minutes. This is a lot of time; hours and hours per day. Even for a small delivery of 10-15 new products, each with many SKU combinations it could take 2-5 hours. If you receive 1,000 products per year then you would have months and months of work just entering them into your system. Downstream, however, the consequences can be even more serious when you need to find a particular product. You would have to know its precise name or start browsing through pages of data to find exactly the right product/size/colour item. If you want to


see a size in all four colours this requires even more searches and so is even more laborious. The data is all there, but it’s very difficult to get at and probably very slow. At the HQ it is soul destroying, but at the till it’s sales destroying.


So ‘easy’ is the ability to enter many size/colour combinations for a single product within a matter of seconds - and then, in one action, to be able to quickly find and assess that complete product with all its SKU combinations. This then is one of the minimum requirements for a system that really can do what’s needed in the real world, and that can even begin to justly claim it is ‘easy to use’. In the next in this series we will explore another aspect of ‘easy to use’ and see why that too is an essential component.


www.sgb-sports.com


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