Ofis, the new stationery business coming out of Harvey Norman is to open locations prior to Christmas according to a report on Sky News this morning.
A report at the Sydney Morning Herald site has more background on the move including this:
Having mused out loud that he might start a rival business to Officeworks, the king of big-box retailing has not only gone and registered the brand name “Ofis”, he has also secured several well-placed sites on which he can open stores of between 1000 and 2000 square metres. (The average size of an Officeworks outlet is 1300 square metres.
While it will not be an immediate threat to the much larger Coles subsidiary, with its 100 stores nationwide, Harvey has shown himself to be a formidable competitor and his arrival on Officeworks’ doorstep will be an unwelcome distraction for a revamped management team.
What ought to shock newsagents into action more than the story of Harvey’s plans is the lack of any reference to newsagents in the reports. Every story about Ofis references Officeworks as the rival, no mention of newsagents. That is either because journalists see this as a big business vs big business battle or because we are irrelevant in the stationery space.
The independence of newsagents is what draws people to our channel. It is what brings us undone in categories like stationery where we each range, price, display and promote differently. Big operators like Officeworks and Gerry Harvey understand the importance of consistency behind a shingle.
The lack of consistency behind the newsagent shingle makes consumers confused and drives our growing irrelevance in the stationery space.
OUR point of difference, driven home daily from customer comment, is the personalised service. Not only can the customer browse with an informative staff member at their side if needed, BUT each week we go shopping with 4-5 full pages of material that our customers have asked for in particular, knowing that we will get it, get it within a week and let them know that we have it. We have grown our market 35% in the last few months based on this shopping habit alone.
Time poor cutomers want to be able to say what they want and then let the specialst go on and get it. Its working for us a treat and the word is spreading fast.
I don’t see Office works as a threat to me, they don’t sell what we sell. We both sell stationary sure, but we sell personal service.
Brett, while it is your perogative to not see Officeworks (and soon Ofis) as a threat, i would suggest you reconsider.
You say that you “go shopping with 4-5 full pages of material that our customers have asked for in particular’ and that you “get it within a week’ – what if those customers could walk accross that road to an Officeworks, that already stocks the product they want (and more). Why would they wait seven days when they could get it immediatly and have the added benefit of seeing and touching it before they buy?
Personal service is the backbone of independant retailers, but we shouldnt think for a second that it protects us from competition.
Overall, Officeworks attracts different stationery customers to newsagencies. I say overall because there is a difference between city and country.
Officeworks reeducated consumers about buying stationery. Their arrival in the 1990s reinforced the perception that newsagencies are expensive. This perception is as strong today as ever. It is the value proposition we (newsagents) need to work on the most.
Newsagents will alwassy win on convenience and service – but these will not make our channel. They will make store stores successful because of their location but channel-wise, stationery is in serious trouble. Ofis will make that tougher for newsagencies within the catchment of the new stores as they will push, again, the perception that we are expensive.
My view on Ofis is that now more than ever newsagents need to get into a marketing group and drive that group to regularly and aggressively promote stationery behind that brand. Done well this can help us compete against Ofis and reinforce already good newsagent operators.
Team,
The point is that the customers that I am nurturing and growing are the ones that have already been to Officeworks et al. The megastores stock only those items that are on the fast movers list. My customers are those that all else seem to ignore. Hence my point that we are not competing, at least not in the same space.
Sure I compete on some lines, tomer and Ink in particular, but I am finding that because I am willing to seek out and find what they want, the customer is also willing to pay the small premium to buy other items here as well.
A typical comment is ‘I’ll be back, you guys always help me.’
Marks point is valid, the newsXpress group certainly helps us compete, and compete we love to do. I maintain a healthy optimism that we can target a slice of the population that OW and Ofice will never win while we chip away at their customer bases from the side.