We opened our third Sophie Randall cards and gifts business today, at Epping Plaza in Victoria. Our plan was to get three Sophie locations open by Christmas and we have achieved that. Now, we;re looking forward to the learnings from this new group. We are already benefiting through experience with a single database IT platform across all stores – facilitating moving stock and reducing in-store management time. We are also benefiting from better buying which is also driven from this single IT platform.
The photos below are from our Epping store today.
While each of the stores has the same layout and elements, there are differences driven by landlords and space challenges.
The range is consistent to around 70% of stock with 30% reflecting the local demographic.
Sophie blogs about the products at www.sophiesblog.com.au.
While I own these initial stores, the Sophie Randall concept is part of the newsXpress group and will be offered to others from early 2008. Some newsagents are already benefiting from Sophie learnings in the gift space. Others are keen to look at getting their own location.
At Forest Hill where we own the newsagency as well as the Sophie store we have first hand experience on the impact of a Sophie store on card sales in the newsagency – nil. Indeed, card sales in our newsagency are delivering double digit growth year-on-year while Sophie is pulling excellent card numbers. Each business offers a different shopper experience.