Author: Mark Fletcher

This photo shows a small part of the range of boxed cards we are selling from our Sophie Randall store.

Settling on the range was a challenge given that traditional card suppliers do not have the broad rang we wanted for year round giving.

Now that we have the range and sales to match, I am confident that at least some of the range would sell in newsagencies if presented appropriately and located between social stationery and greeting cards.

Boxed cards are big in Europe and the US all through the year while in Australia, in most stores, they remain a Christmas focus.

Even though our range is small, these foreign Christmas cards sell very well.

Our view is that if we want to be a destination for cards, we need to cater to all possible niches, including foreign language cards. We do sell foreign language newspapers after all so it makes sense.

What we have not mastered is how we can locate these cards near our foreign language newspapers to maximise the up-sell opportunity – not that we need to as they sell very well.

A call for greeting card category standards

While magazine publishers and distributors long ago reached agreement on category standards, greeting card companies continue to fail newsagents. The lack of standards makes store level reporting, within the greeting card category, challenging. In our software newsagents have exceptional reporting tools – return on floor space, return on shelf space, supplier comparisons, ROI – there are many angles from which newsagents can analyse data gathered by the system. It is impossible for newsagents to determine the best card supplier in their store. This denies them the opportunity to be business like.

Some newsagents are so frustrated by this experience that they are planning to place barcode stickers on cards before they are placed on the shelf.

Card manufacturers must act urgently and together to sort this out. Every month the current situation continues is another month newsagents are not able to have the best possible information available to build their business.
The IT standards necessary to manage this already exist.

This is what I wrote to greeting card companies in the Tower Systems newsagent supplier newsletter in October 2006. I was writing out of frustration – having worked with card companies for more than two years of the data project with little real progress to show for the effort.

While I initiated the project with the card companies first in 2004, getting the 15 or so publishers to agree is where the time has gone.

The Tower newsletter generated significant action and finally, based on meetings we had last week, we can see that standards between card companies are close to final agreement.

Newsagents are set to benefit significantly from this project and it won’t matter what software they run – when I first took this to the card companies I made it clear that we had to approach this the same way we approached the MPA standards in the magazine area. While the smaller software companies benefit from the pioneering work of others, the borader industry benefits and that is what really matters.