I served a customer yesterday who had been told by a friend to come to our newsagency for a calendar for her favourite dog breed. This customer drove past two major shopping centres in 46 degree heat to get the calendar – for her dog. She bought another calendar, a magazine and a card. When talking with her about why she would go out in such extreme heat she said she’d do anything for her dog. She told me she would be back.
We built our calendar range around special interests. This started three years ago and we have got better with time. Word of mouth driving new customers to us like I witnessed yesterday is what we have chased.
The 500 or so 2009 calendars we have on sale now for $5.00 are delivering a healthy margin, more than double what we achieve for magazines. We will sell out and end the calendar season well up – in January we were 13% up on January 2008.
We,ve been selling the dog calendars too for the past 3 years and we now place an initial order for every title we sold the previous year and still have to reorder for new customers. We not only sell dog calendars but also ones for cats, horses, and even ferrets, chickens and so on.
These calendars also give us an insight into related items such as diaries, journals and even giftware that will complement the more popular breeds.
Truly a niche market for those who give enough energy and space to these products.