The clocks by Allen Designs are the newest addition to our giftware range. They occupy a rather awkward space on a wall that customers generally only see as they exit the store. What makes the clocks perfect for this position is the visual impact their swinging pendulums make. Its hard to walk towards the exit without noticing a wall of moving clocks.

They’ve become quite a talking piece the past couple of days with countless customers stopping to get a better look on their way out.

This is the second time we have used the wall for these clocks. The first was a much smaller range and the visual impact was nowhere near as great. Nonetheless, strong sales and customer interest prompted us to increase the range and create this visual magnet a second time around.

Making efficient use of even the most seemingly useless retail space is important in achieving good return per square metre. Too many retailers don’t try to create a synergy by matching product and position – turning potentially profitable products into dead stock or a good position into an underperforming piece of retail real estate.

I can’t count how many mum’s I’ve overheard the past two weeks comment on how great the SBG book covers are. For such a small product they are giving mothers a whole lot of relief at the thought of not having to cover books with contact again.

We had only four designs last year and the great response led us to increase both our range and stock levels for this years back to school season. So far the book covers are selling at twice the rate of their standard contact counterparts … and at almost double the profit margin. We’ve found key to their success is a high traffit location, directly adjacent to our range of standard contact. If their sales trend continues they may be our best new BTS product of 2010.

Many NSW retailers and shoppers were denied their Boxing Day sales this year, after the state government toughened restrictions on major retailers opening on the Saturday public holiday. Why? Because they received complaints from family and religious groups who were “outraged at the extent of Boxing Day trading across NSW last year“.

The government should not, under any circumstances, deny retailers the ability to trade on public holidays. While certain groups will complain about retailers trading on public holidays (especially those that are religious holidays), they cannot deny the fact that retailers are only responding to consumer demand. If consumers did not want retailers to trade on Boxing Day then they wouldn’t turn up in their masses for what is one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

“Retail workers have made it clear they want more time with their families,” the secretary of Unions NSW, Mark Lennon, told the paper.

What Mark Lenno forgets to mention in the statement is that retailers can’t force their employees to work on public holidays and those that choose to work do so with the benefit of extremely high penalty rates. If retail workers want more time with their families then they can have it. Not allowing retailers to trade on Boxing Day does not change this. If anything, retail workers have been disadvantaged by not being given the opportunity to work even if they wanted to.

It will be interesting to see if the NSW government continues the practice of preventing major retailers from opening on other public holidays.

Twilight merchandise has, predictably, proven to be a huge hit for Christmas. Even with a range of over 40 different products we have still had significant demand for more. While we didn’t capitalise on the opportunity to expand our range even further this year, the release of the third Twilight movie, Eclipse, in 2010 will provide us with another opportunity to go out even harder with more merchandise.

Having Twilight as one of our major Christmas pitches not only sends our customers the message that we’re relevant, but positions us as a destination store. Its products like this that help us redefine our place in the market.

The digital photo keyrings, featured in the newsXpress Merry Giftmas brochure at $19.95,  have been a huge success in the lead up to Christmas. Positioned as a impulse item, the keyrings have been easy to pitch as stocking-stuffer. Good margin, small footprint and high turnover have made these our number one product this Christmas.

It is also interesting that many customers are purchasing multiple keyrings. One customer purchased 14 – presumably every person in their family will be receiving one come Christmas.

Some of the major retailers have a similar product pitched at a cheaper price. Their product however is packaged less attractively and so it ends up being positioned at the end user, rather than as gift. Ours is an easier pitch.

Finding mass-market products is often difficult, so its great to see a product that cuts through all market segments. The keyrings appeal to everyone from teens to grandparents. Because most are purchased as gifts, the end user doesn’t have to be tech savvy – many will end up being given with the photos already loaded.

Tuesday’s OZ Lotto draw was not won and now jackpots t $40M. This presents retailers with lottery agencies the perfect opportunity to leverage the increase in traffic and pitch even harder for Christmas, just three weeks out from the big day. Sales opportunities are endless and smart retailers will be pulling out all the stops to get that extra share to the Christmas market.

We’ll be reconfiguring the front of our shop to make it more lotto-shopper-friendly over the next week, maximising our opportunities and defining a clear point of purchase pitch for our lotto counter.

While it isn’t likely to happen, lottery brands should have preempted a jackpot and reconfigured their official pitch to leverage the OZ Lotto traffic and draw in additional early traffic for what is usually a last minute Christmas gift. Unfortunately, it will probably be left up to individual agents.

These flashing Christmas necklaces are the perfect impulse product. We’ve sold out of our original 72 in just over a week and still have customers asking for them. We were a little hesitant at first given the RRP of $12.95 so decided to pitch them at $9.95 and keep them below the $10 price point which seems to mark a barrier for impulse items.

To help drive sales we forced encouraged our sales counter team to wear one. Its very hard to miss a bright flashing necklace around someones neck. The tactic has most definitely worked with many customers deciding that they too wanted to look as ridiculous as our team and were willing to fork out $9.95 to do so.

Yesterday was the last day we home delivered News Limited publications. Our distribution agreement expired and we did not seek to renew it. We have given Fairfax six months notice of our intention to terminate and that contract too will cease at the end of March 2010. We did not sell our run, we simply handed it back to the publisher.

While our run was profitable, it added little value to our retail business and continued to pose a number of operational nightmares. Given our area’s demographic and the high income offered by the major industries of employment (ie. mines, army, industrial related trades and power stations) delivery drivers have been almost impossible to come by. The amount of time spent manging subscriptions, statements, account payments and delivery changes often takes valuable time away from our retail operations.

Fairfax have so far been very approachable and open in dealing with the furture cessation of our contract. In stark contrast, News Limited have been nothing but difficult, dictatorial and vindictive. News Limited were given two months notice, as required by contract, in which to make arrangements for another distributor to take over home deliveries. They wasted the majority of these two months making no attempt to organise for a new distribution agent to take our place. Over the past week or so News Limited found that the newsagent adjoining our territory was willing to take on the delivery, but given the short notice the newsagent needed additional time to find delivery drivers. News Limited organised for the adjoining newsagent to temporarily service our subagents until they are able to find additional drivers (if they are able to find them). All this was only finalised yesterday, the last day of delivery.

Needless to say, we have not been able to communicate to our customers that they will not receive home delivery of News Limited publications until further notice. News Limited have let down both us, a retailer of their products, and the readers of their products.

News Limited made no attempt to help us receive future supply of their products as a subagent of the adjoining newsagent. We have been left with no supply of News Limited products for at least the weekend period. We were originally told that if we did not continue to deliver for at least another three weeks (giving further time for them to sort out the situation) we would not receive any supply.

News Limited made no attempt to communicate information to their home delivery customers, both local and subscription, about the changes. Letters were not sent and we have been left to deal with the fallout this morning. Luckily, nearly all our customers have been very understanding. Not even the News Limited subscription department was informed of the situation. They had to call us to find out what was going on with their own subscriptions!

In typical News Limited style, they have taken a short sighted ’screw you’ approach to a retail-only newsagent. Unfortunately, they seem to have taken a somewhat similar approach to their readers as well.

We’ve taken all steps necessary to minimise any negative fallout and hope to be back to normal retailing come Monday.

The Better Homes & Gardens Christmas issue is our biggest selling title all year. Only 8 days after going on-sale we have sold through all our original allocation and over a third of our extra stock. This is one of only two or three titles each year to which we give double off-location. In addition to it’s normal shelf space the Christmas issue receives both a position on our magazine power end and a position on a dedicated CDU from Pacific Magazines.

The continual success of the BH&G title is amplified in its Christmas issue. It’s a high impulse item (as are Christmas themed magazines in general) and it responds well to positioning it as such. I is worth noting that the vast majority (I’d estimate over 90%) of copies we have sold are from the off-location positions.

Its also great that Pacific Magazines had the foresight to create a CDU for the Christmas period. While they would like it to be used for multiple titles we find that having only one facing of a title diminishes the impact of a display. We wouldn’t allocate space for a display unit housing just any title, but for the right title or promotion we’ll find the room. If we don’t think a display unit will pay it’s way we won’t use it. We have disposed of a number of cardboard and more expensive metal display units sent to us by publishers in the past. Had those publishers consulted us prior to distributing the units they could have saved themselves the manufacturing and distribution costs. Pacific magazines was, this time, one of the lucky ones.

The book sale from the newsXpress Christmas brochure has proven to be an early sales success. We’ve already sold out of a number of books only a week after putting the stock on display. Given the early success of the book sale we’ll expand our range and place another order to the same value as our original stock investment.

Its also worth noting that we have found a number of the products included in the sale also being sold at BigW. In almost every case we were priced cheaper than the competition.

This is only our third book sale and each one continues to be a huge hit. Through the newsXpress and ABW preferred supplier relationship we get access to great range, marketing material and high profit margins. Its these things that will help this ‘new money’ category easily add a five figure value to our yearly sales.

I know Halloween was done is dusted a little while ago, but I didn’t get around to writing about it, so here’s the wrap.

In only our second year breaking into the Halloween season we went bigger and better. More stock and bigger displays proved key in taking the season to new sales heights. We managed to increase Halloween sales by a whopping 112% on last year.

Given the success of last year we almost doubled our product range and tested some more pricey items from Tomfoolery. Our two most expensive products, both wigs, were in the top three selling products when ranked by dollar sales and profit.

Next year we plan on making an even bigger statement with Halloween! An even larger range, more display space and more retail theatre should help us push the season to even higher sales in 2010.

These 3D bookmarks from the newsXpress Christmas brochure have proven to be a huge hit with customers. Sales of the bookmarks have seen many customers purchasing multiple designs as the perfect stocking stuffer. They’ve gone over extremely well with parents and grandparents, both of which are more inclined to purchase educational-related products. Bookmarks also happen to tie in well with our newsXpress Christmas book sale.

In only 3 days of being on sale we’d sold out of four of the nine designs. The $3.95 price point positions the product perfectly for impulse and quick turnover while still retaining excellent margin. If the product continues to go well we will introduce a larger range and look at keeping it as a giftware line beyond the Christmas season.

2009/2010 will be our best year ever for diaries and calendars. Our sales are tracking astonishing growth off what we thought was an already reasonable 2008/2009 season.

Calendar sales are curretly tracking at 39% growth on last year. We have found that a larger display is really helping this category. We’ve would normally have only double sided calendar bar and two cardboard display units, but decided to expand this by adding two spinners (as awkward and as ugly as they are). We’ve also been promoting calendars with themed power-end displays including “cats and dogs”, “family planners” and “tween-interests” (think Zac Efron, Hannah Montana and Twilight), all of which help lift the profile of the category instore.

Diaries are our star performer, curenty tracking at 78% growth on last year. Our range has not changed dramatically from last year with only a few additions based on the previous year’s demands. We did go out a little earlier, but only by about a week. What seems to have driven sales is the category’s new location and the fixturing used to display it. We would traditionally display diaries flat on one our our giftware display bases, but given the space constraints that Christmas brings we decided to use a stand from Compendium, normally used for displaying gift-books. The stand doesn’t hold huge amounts of stock, but displays a lot of facings. Its footprint is very small which makes it perfect during the Christmas season. Where we would normally put diaries at the front of store, we decided to place them in our second highest traffic location – the counter queue. We don’t normally place things here because it interrupts the traffic flow and makes things a little cramped but again, its Christmas time in retail, so that rule goes out the window. The move has worked a treat, actually making the category more noticeable because people aren’t used to seeing a stand in this location.

I discovered a newsagent today that charges its customers for putaways. That’s right, this newsagent charges its customers for having a regular order.  25c per putaway is what is costs to be a customer in this newsagency.

This has to be one of the worst examples of customer service I’ve seen in the industry. A putaway fee punishes regular customers who are are likely to be more loyal to the business, spend more when they shop there and give the business a guaranteed sale. Charging these customers who benefit the business is simply n absurd business practice.

On a different note, I also suspect that it may be in breach of newspaper publisher contracts.

In our business we take a different approach to our putaway customers. We encourage putaways because they’re profitable. Not only do we actively encourage them, we provide our customers with a freetext message letting them know each time their puaway arrives (excluding daily and weekly publications). Our customers love this service and we’ve managed to grow our putaways significantly since introducing it.

The difference in customer service in the industry never cease to amaze me. When I hear of newsagents likes this it reinforces our decision to actively distance ourselves from the term ‘newsagent’ and always represent ourselves as ‘newsXpress’. I don’t want to be lumped in the same basket as a newsagent who charges people for being good customers

Sales of Prevention magazine’s second issue have been awful in our store. Only 6 copies sold, down from a just-over-one-week sellout of 30 copies of the first issue. From what other newsagents are telling me, it would appear our situation is not uncommon. I can’t pinpoint any particular reason for the backlash in interest in comparison to the first issue, but I would surmise it stems from a number of issues.

Firstly the lack of available stock for the first issue will undoubtedly mean that many people who would have tried the new magazine have now forgotten about it. It wasn’t available when they wanted it so they loose the temporary interest they had in the title. This was the publisher’s first big mistake. No new magazine launch should ever run out of stock.

Secondly the content itself may be to blame. Our team had a quick flick through the title and it feels very ‘advertorial’ and not too heavy on ‘real’ written content. We honestly weren’t very impressed.

Thirdly, the target market is rather in comparison to other major titles. By its very nature, targeting women over 40 is going to limit the success of any title.

Fourthly the cover price of $5.95 may seem too high in the eyes of consumers. For a publication that has a much smaller format that a traditional A4 magazine, $5.95 does not put forward a value proposition (especially when one considers the content).

I want to see the title flourish (I wouldn’t have given it prime space allocation for almost two months if I didn’t), but I am not sure what the future will hold for this new publication. I’m not sure this title is exactly what the category needs. What I would love to see is a magazine extension of the hugely popular show “Whats Good For You“. That brand is already established, the target audience is very broad, the content format would be relatively straightforward and there is clear interest in the topic. Prevention offers none of this.