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My view is that a manufacturer should manufacture and a retailer should retail’
Sean Hannam: Direct selling is one of the themes that’s been raised at the conference. Is it a problem for you? Paul Mead: I’m very passionate. My view is that a manufacturer should manufacture and a retailer should retail, but I’m not naïve – I can see the direction manufacturers are travelling in. I’m pleading with them to take us on that journey with them and not just set up their own internet sites and ignore the might of Euronics and the other buying groups. There are too many links to AO, Currys and even Argos –
what benefits are those businesses giving to their products? We’re solution providers. Every time a Dyson advert comes on TV, I throw my remote at it – we built that brand as independents and now it’s ‘buy direct’ from the people who make it.
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It needs to be a level playing field. If a manufacturer is offering something online, we’ve got to be able to offer the same
Martin Jukes, head of retail at Avensys
Martin Jukes: It needs to be a level playing field. If a manufacturer is offering something online, we’ve got to be able to offer the same, but then still have the display discounts, to put it on show for customers to touch and feel – not go online like I saw yesterday, with one white-goods manufacturer offering 25 percent off if a customer bought three appliances – it was cheaper to do that than it was to buy from us. That’s not right.
Paul Giles: Suppliers undercutting us online is totally of order. They are getting the retail margin – that’s not their margin. If they going to use our showrooms, they need us to promote
their brand. How can you spend big money on something if you haven’t seen it somewhere? We are being used as the showroom for their online. That’s where I think we need to draw the line. You could say that we need to be better at capturing that
customer, but sometimes, when consumers are dealing with a brand, and the brand isn’t able to deliver, like a local retailer would,
24 Retra Conference Review
then that’s the message that we need to get across – we’re end-to- end and cradle to grave.
SH: There was a trend for consumers to shop local during the pandemic. Do you think that will continue, or will it drop off? PG: It won’t drop off as long as we don’t let it. We’ve got to give people a reason to keep coming to us for our local service – we’ve got to enhance it and keep it going.
SH: Where do you see the market heading? MJ: Online will stay strong, but it will recede, and we will see people come back in-store. We will continue to promote our in- store business, but I’m so glad I cross-trained all my staff to do the online side. That’s keeping our business alive and it’s growing the business, so we can do more projects with manufacturers in-store and plan for the future.
PG: Online isn’t going away for us – it’s integrated into our business. It’s obvious how much the consumer is looking at our own website to educate themselves before they come in to touch and feel products. We’re going to continue to enhance all those things we’re
doing – we’re omnichannel. We have so much data on consumers, but, as an industry,
we’re not using it well enough. Our focus is on the data we’ve got – reworking it, managing it, cleansing it and using it to bring customers back in-store and online.
Paul Mead
The theme of this year’s Retra Conference was The Challenge of Change. Alert editor, Sean Hannam, hosted a panel session of Retra members – Paul Mead, managing director of Michael R Peters, in Bedford; Martin Jukes, head of retail at Avensys in Crawley, and Paul Giles, managing director of Snellings and Gerald Giles, in Norwich – and talked about some of the challenges and opportunities out there.
Retra Conference Review
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