Retailer round table
kbb Birmingham 2018 Show Special
How to… deal with the challenges of retail
Running a retail business can be fraught with issues. But, you are not alone. Rebecca Nottingham talks to a panel of successful retailers, at Vado’s Material Lab, in London, about the day-to-day matters affecting their businesses and gets some practical tips and advice on how best to deal with them
The panel
Lisa Kyme, franchisee for Ripples London, Tunbridge Wells, Brighton and Reigate
Sarah Jones, co-director Bathrooms at Source, Wandsworth
Martin Lang, Bury Bathroom and Kitchen Centre, Bury St Edmunds
“My parents founded the company 30 years ago, and I’ve been retailing with Ripples for 18 years. I’ve run the London franchise for 15 years and prior to that, I ran the Bath showroom with my sister Nicola who is still heavily involved in the business as well. I’ve been running the Reigate, Tunbridge Wells and Brighton franchises for the past year.”
“We’re a family business, I run it in partnership with my brother Terry. We’ve been around for 20 years this year and we have a team of 13. The business is split between retail, contract and installation. Retail and installation together account for over 70% of the business and contracts are starting to creep in. We’re quite new to contract work but it was a big chunk of our business last year.”
Q & A
Q: How do you deal with the ups and downs of retailing? Sarah Jones: The first quarter of 2017 was really challenging so we had a brainstorming session with everyone in the business to work out how we were going to tackle the rest of the year. Part of the plan was to stop being so reliant on walk-ins and to go out and generate new business ourselves. We have online stores as well, which we launched to help us compete in that channel. We don’t know why, but
we found those really struggled last year, so we’ve taken our focus away from them for the time being and are pushing more towards the contract market, where we’ve identified some growth. The plan worked. Things really picked up towards the end of the year because we went out there networking and generating business. We’re not setting the world on fire, but the retail side is doing OK for us, installations are through the roof. What works for us is that we have a variety of routes to market, so we’re not reliant on one source of income.
Martin Lang: We’re really fortunate that we seem to be good at what we do in our own little, tiny way.
54 kbbreview kbb Birmingham Special Edition March 2018
“We’re a small bathroom and kitchen business in Bury St Edmunds. I run it with my wife and we’ve been around for 10 years. Our business is based heavily on recommendation and repeat business and that can be from consumers or trade customers who come back to us with their clients because of the service we provide.”
So, consequently business goes up year on year – sometimes 10, 20, or sometimes 30% and we’ve never had a blip yet. We like to think of ourselves as a specification showroom, so we actively target the repeat business – so interior designers, architects, builders and plumbers/fitters etc. We don’t advertise but we are very strong on recommendations. We diversified into kitchens three years ago. That decision was partly due to our relationship with Mereway but also to explore new revenue streams. What we’ve found is that kitchens are just so much easier than bathrooms because of the expectation of spend. Consumers tend to take for
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