INDIE RETAILER FOCUS The Cinema Store
As a postman in the 80s, The Cinema Store owner, Neil Palmer, began his business as a hobby. Today the collectables and memorabilia store enjoys custom from all over the globe. Robert Hutchins discusses the plans of an alternative toy retailer
Tell us about your store. We are not what you call a conventional toy shop. Our store is mainly for teenagers and upwards and collectors. We’re in Covent Garden so we’re not really designed around kids. Saying that, we like to stock items that we can sell to kids as well as adults, such as Star Wars toys. Just don’t expect any Pokémon. We don’t get enough kids through the shop for that kind of thing. As well as collectables and the more teenage toys, we sell books, magazines and DVDs.
What is your background? We have been here for 20 years… I must be mad. I was a postman back in the 80s, this was just a hobby then. Basically, I had too much stuff, posters, magazines and all sorts. I used to do the odd convention at the weekend as a little supplement to my job and this eventually turned into a full time job. I rented a shop in Covent Garden in 1993, and because everything had been annihilated by the recession of the early 90s, we got a cheap short-term lease for a couple of years. We moved to this shop two years after. We were basically a success as soon as we opened. We were pre- internet and in the mid Nineties, this stuff became really collectable.
How is your business divided between collectables and books/DVDs throughout the year? Our toy market is mainly from summer through to January, then it seems to really slow down. It’s then that we fall back
on DVD sales and books, magazines and posters. Toys do go a bit crazy through Halloween and Christmas.
In the second half of the
year, we start giving the costumes more space. Costumes do well for six weeks, then it goes back more and more to toy merchandise. Our
secondary business is doing
Online is very competitive so you have to be selective on what you sell or be very price promoting. Neil Palmer, The Cinema Store
conventions. We sell at all the specialist conventions throughout the country. There’s about ten a year that we set up at.
What kind of toys/ collectables do you stock? We do a lot of the Macfarlane range, the Neca lines and the Mezco stuff. It’s all the mid-range sort of products, so between £15 and £40. That’s what our people want to buy, they don’t want to buy a £200 toy. Anything to do with Chuckie or Nightmare on Elm Streetdoes really well for us. We do a lot of the Assassin’s Creedstuff. That’s really popular, not really a movie but so popular we have to stock it. All the cool 1980’s stuff such as Alien, Predator, anything with 1980 written on it – Gremlins, E.T. That’s the stuff that is
really popular. 64 November
How do you promote to the local community? Having some web presence helps. A lot of tourists go online, and when they come to London they search for memorabilia and we come up. So we sell a lot of the stuff in the shop through people searching the web. At Halloween, we have someone dressed as Michael Myers walking around the local area.
What’s having the most impact on your business at the moment? Last year, we struggled in August because of the Olympics. Tourists weren’t touring and we saw a massive drop in sales. It did recover very quickly
afterwards. The tourist market is really key to us being busy as they are the ones who come and spend over and above what your average UK spender –
with all their money troubles – does. I think the recession is
still felt around the country. When we take stuff up to conventions, you do feel that people haven’t got as much to spend. We have to tailor the stock we take up, with a lot more £10 and below priced items.
What plans for expansion have you got for the next 12 months? I have been trying to get a sub website going with all the costumes we do on it, because that is becoming a big deal. We’ll probably have that going next year. I am constantly getting
asked to do conventions. One guy asked me to do one in Sweden, which considering we get a lot of money coming in from Swedish people, I may look into. So we can always do more, without having to have more shops. We have to be careful with online, it is very competitive so you either have to be very selective of what you sell online, or be very price promoting.
www.toynews-online.biz
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