MISFIT
Market Research A “
u revoir, Monsieur Dubois” I said as another satisfied customer left the shop. “Mr. Dubois (all names changed) comes to England once a year and makes a point of calling on us for a pair or two before he goes home. He speaks beautifully clear French, so I get a chance to brush up my
French as well as doing a little business which makes him a special customer. Mr. Dubois is special not merely because he is a famous musician back home in his native Mali and fairly well-known in the rest of the world (something I have only recently learned) unlike the great majority of our customers who make little impression. They come in, choose shoes, pay for them and depart. If they fill in one of our slips which allow us to e-mail them then we have a record of their names, but rarely can we put a face to the name. We have a principle that our only interest in our customers is in selling them shoes and putting their money in the till. Colour, race, religion, gender orientation, politics, odd personal habits, all mean nothing to us. Who they are and what they get up to outside our shop is entirely their business. As far as we are concerned all animals are equal but some have bigger feet than others. But some customers cannot help but be
memorable. The most notable is the one who always visits us first thing in the morning. The first time we met I observed a well-built lady wearing four inch stilettos waiting at the door for the shop to open. It was only when she turned round and I saw his bushy black beard that I realised she wasn’t. He is now a regular customer, and we hardly notice his beard or think it at all odd that he wears ladies’ shoes. As long as he pays for them that is entirely his business. Another customer who stands out from the crowd is the nice man from Christchurch. Not Christchurch, Hants, but Christchurch New Zealand. I once ventured to ask him if he came half way round the world expressly to buy shoes from us. Not so; he comes over every year to see his elderly mother which, by the way, is what leads the musician from Mali to our door. Mothers are good for business. There is one special customer whose visits we really look forward to. Mrs Hunt is a pleasant Irish lady who invariably takes advantage of our two pair discount offer; in fact she has been known to up the discount by buying three at a time which is pleasing but not exceptional. What we love about her is her uncanny ability to make trade perk up. I don’t know about anyone else but there is a period every year, usually in February and August, when things are somewhat slack. The new season is waiting in the wings and looks as if it is never actually going to stir itself and get onto the stage. And then one fine day Mrs Hunt appears, buys her shoes and things start to move. There is no logical, scientific, explanation of this phenomenon, but it happens, every time. Perhaps our oddest customer, if that is the right word, since she never
buys anything, is Karen. Karen is a shoplifter. I know this because I was a witness at her trial and saw her convicted. (She was one of the ladies who
12 • FOOTWEAR TODAY • MARCH 2012
sat on the steps of the Police Station to check out their loot.) Not therefore the brightest of buttons, as evidenced by the fact that she keeps coming back. She gets very personal service: a staff member stands by her side all the time keeping an eye on her hands. No doubt Dr. Freud would have some idea about her behaviour, but to us she is just an amusing nuisance. These are the exceptions. The majority of our customers are ordinary
people, almost unknown to us. I say almost unknown because one of the strengths of Misfit Shoes is its database. It goes back a long way, to the days of ’Arry the Amstrad (yes, this column has been going on for a long long time) when we invited customers to tell us their addresses, to which we added details like their size and date of visit and put the result on ’Arry’s primitive database to enable us to mail them about special offers, etc. The original idea was to help us to get rid of slow-moving stock by writing to all our customers who took, say, size 7 if we were overstocked on that size, but we found that people actually liked getting what they thought was a personal letter from me from time to time. I used to sit down and sign them all individually – a chore, especially when we had a sale and wrote to them all, but it paid off.
Perhaps our oddest customer, if that is the right word, since she never buys anything, is Karen. Karen is a shoplifter. I know this because I was a witness at her trial and saw her convicted. (She was one of the ladies who sat on the steps of the Police Station to check out their loot.) Not therefore the brightest of buttons, as evidenced by the fact that she keeps coming back.
Mail shots have been replaced by e-mails, but always carefully targeted,
and always with a message which is likely to interest most of the recipients. We have not fallen into the temptation of firing off an e-mail every week to remind our customers of our existence. I may be wrong but I reckon all that will do is make them click on ‘unsubscribe’. Our database, the building of which has been a lot of hard work, has paid
off. Without it we might possibly not be in business today. We even get customers writing back to us from time to time. I must stress that it is not just a simple list of names. Maybe we know more about our customers than some of them realise, and you might think it is a little sinister, but knowing things like someone’s e-mail and shoe size is unlikely to be of interest to the security services, the popular press or even the weirdest geek and even if we do get hacked, what could they do with the information.
Open a shoe shop…now there’s a thought.
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