THE ENTERTAINER The Entertainer: A family affair
Even though it’s the UK’s biggest independent toy chain, The Entertainer is still a family business. We spoke to owner Gary Grant and his directors – and sons – Stuart and Duncan, to find out how the retailer is offering the traditional toy shop ideal on a national scale, while adapting to meet consumers’ expectations of modern retailing
Speaking to Gary Grant, we find out what has changed since the first Entertainer store opened in 1981, why treating kids like royalty is important and what can be done to make toy launches more exciting…
In terms of expansion, this has been your biggest year yet. How do you plan to keep the momentum? The company has been going for 31 years. It started in 1981 and from opening to 1992 we opened three shops. Then between 1992 and 2002 we opened a further 25 shops and another 50 between 2002 and 2012. So that just shows the stepping up of our growth. The industry has
changed dramatically since the end of 2008, which marked the closure of Woolworths. When you have a retailer, which I think at the time was 14 per cent of the toy industry and had 880 stores offering toys in all of them, when that retailer goes what gets left is a vacuum for toys. Obviously people don’t stop buying toys so they start to change their buying habits and they go to other places. Maybe they’re going to another town, or maybe they’re turning to the internet. But assuming that people haven’t given up buying toys, the fact that there’s now not a toy offering in some High Streets, means that there is a huge opportunity for a toy retailer to expand.
How have things changed since you first opened? Retail is changing. It isn’t all about boxes on tin shelves now – it’s about a retail experience. That’s our objective: create an environment with knowledgeable staff and a great collection of
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products at fair pricing to enable something that keeps bringing the customers back.
Would you ever consider the super store model? No. That’s not our remit, we’re not an out of town seller. We are a retailer of toys in towns and communities that have regular footfall. We are where children
are with their pocket money. We are where children are after school, where people go shopping as a family on Saturday. We know the model that works for us, and large out of town super stores – that’s not us.
Are you bringing the traditional toy shop back to the High Street? If you talk to an adult or a grandparent and you allow them to reminisce about what a toy shop was for them when they were three, five or seven, it would’ve been a magical, inviting place. We do many things to
engage with children in the store, from swap days to character visits. I guess in everything we do it’s about saying: ‘How can we make a child king or queen for a day? How can we make them feel really special?’
So how do you do that? It comes about by observing what’s going on in the shop.
Once, one of our members of staff completely overlooked a child that was at the counter and went on to serve the customer behind the child. I went ballistic, because it is a children’s shop. To overlook the child and sell to the adult behind them because they’re taller – we really failed that child. We now have steps at our counters so children
Gary Grant and his sons, Stuart and Duncan, run the 78-strong chain of Entertainer toy shops – the largest independent chain in the UK.
can walk up and pay for the product themselves. That’s part of being treated as somebody special. It’s making them experience something no other shop in the High Street [would do] - You wouldn’t get that in Next, you wouldn't get it in WHSmiths, you wouldn’t get it in Tesco. So when they are asked when they are a parent, they can reminisce about their experiences in a toy shop the same way their parents or grandparents can.
our shops every week. With Moshi Monsters Moshlings Series 4 we opened our shops early to launch [the range]. It’s trying to create excitement and some of the razzmatazz around something, rather than just putting it on the shelf. Other industries make a big deal about their launches and as an industry we just put things out. We’ve got to start competing. We’ve got to learn from other industries
There’s got to be a bit more joined up
thinking from what the manufacturer is doing and what we’re doing as retailers.
How do you work with suppliers and brands? We work much closer with suppliers and licensors in how we professionally put our windows together – we have a proper window programme and now everything is professionally printed. When suppliers are about to launch a range our windows marry in with those product launches. We also have character visits in-store. We probably have three or four characters around some of
and make the toy industry just as good as them. If Nintendo was launching a new game, you wouldn’t stroll into the market and just find it – you would know about it. The toy industry needs to be the same.
It's not just about the TV
advertising, the promotion, whatever it might be, has got to drop through to retail. Because if they spend all that money doing those things and then people wander in the shop
and [the product’s] not out or it’s on the top shelf, then the industry collectively is not getting the rewards from the investment that’s being made in marketing.
What’s the best part of your job? Apart from seeing the Saturday night figures come in? It’s the buying that makes me buzz. As a family, the most satisfying thing for me is to have my two oldest sons in the business.
Duncan Grant – he’s our multichannel director so he’s involved with the Internet, with strategy and to some degree, with the finance side of the business because he’s a chartered accountant. Then there’s Stuart
Grant, my next son down who more people know because he’s our buying director. Just working with the
boys every day is one of the highlights.
Another thing that’s been a highlight over the years is that as a company we support a lot of charities. We give ten per cent of our profits every year to charities and seeing the difference our business has been able to make, predominantly in the lives of many children, has also been an enjoyment.
February 63
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