How was your Christmas? Mine was great. Except for the shopping part – I left it to the last minute, and it was a rush. Judging by the crowds of people, I wasn’t the only one.
But it wasn’t really the crowds that were the worst part. For me, it was a lack of inspiration. What to buy?
I got plenty of stuff in the end, and I hope those who received gifts like them (they certainly said they did). But despite searching the highstreet stores, I was left feeling pretty vacant.
What was I looking for? To be totally honest, I’m not sure. I wanted to buy something different. And therein is the problem.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve watched countless local (and national) news reports about the disintegrating economy and the plight of the highstreet. In fact there are several highstreet stores that keep cropping in the reports. One of those is John Lewis, who seem to have bucked the trend this year.
I bought at least 50% of my gifts from John Lewis here in Milton Keynes. Why? They offered the most interesting, compelling and fairly priced (yet high quality) products that I stumbled across.
Boros is another brand that has kept popping up on local news. They’ve had one of their staff on TV moaning about poor sales during the festive season. If you aren’t familiar with Boros, they’re a retailer in Central Milton Keynes based very close to John Lewis. They sell luggage (like Samsonite) and brand name handbags.
I think it’s fair to say that businesses like Boros are just fine. They’re good. In fact in some cases they might be very good at what they do. I’d go so far as to say that they have a nice selection of products, a well designed store, presentable and courteous staff.
But in the current market, just fine, good, and even very good may just not be good enough. Why? Because if you’re very good, you aren’t standing out – you’re fitting in with the other stores that do the exact same thing that you do, and are being passed by those consumers who are already either pretty saturated, or have found out that they can buy a lot cheaper online.
Close to Boros and John Lewis was my favourite retailer this Christmas. Honestly I don’t know what they were called, but I can tell you that they sold glove puppets. Some really strange ones, some really cool ones.
I know, this sounds very strange. But that’s the point – everyone I walked past their stand with, commented on them. Some of my family even bought them. One thing’s for sure – they had a sizeable crowd around the stand for the entire Christmas period – while stores like Boros suffered. They didn’t have fancy advertising, high quality design, or TV advertising campaigns to get their message out. They just had a great product, and one that was so different to everything else being sold, that it attracted customers in flocks.
Is your business fine, good, very good – or totally different? If it’s the former, then how can you make it more radical? What’s your dream for 2012?
Many of us need to accept that pretty much everything has changed, not only in the retail space, but in a whole lot of industries. The internet has totally wiped out the need for a middle man in many cases – music, movies, TV, magazines, newspapers, books. That makes life for a highstreet retailer that bit more tough. Now you need a reason for people to come and visit your store – you can’t just rely on a captive audience, and that’ll require a good amount of creativity, and whole heap more risk. But maybe not quite as much risk as NOT changing with the times.
Thanks to MShades for the awesome photo.
