Calendars

We will be pre-selling the 2011 Lady GaGa calendar given the success of her recent tour and the popualrity of magazines featuring her.  We know from our Micahel Jackson calendar success last year that pre-selling is an excellent (and profitable!) opportunity.  We will have the flyer out in the next few days.

The Friendship Book is a popular item in newsagencies this time of the year.  We usually sell out easily.  This year, we have The Friendship Book 2010 calendar to add value to the opportunity.  This is sure to do well too.  While not successful for everyone, the customers who purchase The Friendship Book also purchase People’s Friend, the Melbourne Observer, a selection of British magazines and a certain style of cards and stationery we have.  This knowledge helps us carefully place products to guide efficiency.

In my experience, newsagents don’t know enough about their customers and end up placing products where they can find space rather than based on data driven strategy.

With the 2010 Official Michael Jackson calendars now in stock, we can see the value of our pre-sale campaign.  We have close to eighty calendars sold and paid for, at full price, before we put any stock out on the shelves.

We are using the pre-sell approach selectively in several areas to help our customers ensure that they get what they are looking and to lock in revenue for us before any retailers have the stock on the shelves.

The key is to have rules around payment and refunds – you don-t want to take pre-orders and have them cancelled when people can buy the items cheaper elsewhere.

We choose pre-sell items based on what else sells well in our newsagencies: Michael Jackson product is a good example as is anything to do with Twilight.

I first wrote about our plans for the Jackson calendar on August 1.  I have been contacted by some newsagents who copied the idea and achieved excellent results as we have.  This is great feedback.  The more we share ideas like this the better.

Our competitors are less likely to have the infrastructure necessary to make pre-selling work.  For smart newsagents, it taps into our magazine putaway offer.  As we saw with the Packson calendar, we are playing to our strengths and leveraging an excellent point of difference.  I my own case, the GP alone is close to $1,500 – GP achieved before we received the stock.  How good is that?!!

I am shocked to see some retailers, including newsagents, are discounting calendars.  This does not make sense so early in the season.  Trawl back through blog posts here over the last five years and you’ll see that I have learned my lesson on calendar discounting – leave it until after January 1.

While discounts of 25% and 50% – yes I have seen this already this year – may drive calendar sales, this gives up margin unnecessarily in my view.

The key to maintaining maximum margin with calendars is range.  What the team at Forest Hill is achieving this year is proof of that.  Sales are up 14% on last year.  What makes this even more special is that our store manager controls the range.  He has backed himself and it is resulting in excellent dividends.

By holding the line on price, based on an excellent range and brilliant customer service, we are banking good results.  It is not too late for all newsagents to take this approach.

The photo shows a quarter of the range of calendars we have on display at our newsXpress Forest Hill outlet right now.  Click on the image for a larger version.  As we do with magazines, we pursue range as our point of difference for calendars.  take a look at the range of dog breeds covered to get a feel for how far we take this.

We have customers visit because they have heard that we have the best calendar range in the area.  We also have orders from customers looking for calendars of special interest areas – people we may see only once or twice a year.

We should have all of our calendar range in stock and on the shiop floor in the next couple of weeks.  We will not discount until the start of 2010.  Our margin on calendars is north of 50%.  This is why calendars get prime location on the dance floor at the front of the newsagency.

Sales are already strong, matching stationery in and cards some days.  Sales will increase each week as we head to Christmas.

Newsagents still have an opportunity to own calendar sales.  The channel can do this by taking control and driving a pull model, where you order what you want, rather than the push model, where suppliers like magazine distributors send stock.  It is hard work.  The rewards in terms of new traffic and good margin are worth it.  In choosing what to order, look at your magazine sales.  That data is ‘gold’ in guiding purchase decisions.

While we have sold calendars for years, our calendar strategy today is the newsXpress calendar strategy.  For the record, I am a Director of newsXpress.

We started putting out our range of 2010 desk calendars out last week and right away they started selling.  We have them located next to our main newspaper stand, near our photocopies.  As with regular calendars, the titles selling best right now are those which appeal to special interests.  People will buy now for a Christmas gift if they see something which they know will be hard to buy elsewhere.  Our team has selected titles which separate is from more mainstream calendar retailers.

The success we generate with calendars is up to us.  We have the foot traffic and we already serve key special interest areas.  The right stock in a high profile location should work for any newsagent.

We are promoting some of our special interest calendars in with our special interest magazines – where we are able to create space and where the fit is good. A good example of this is our placement of the railway calendar – Great Rail Journeys from Bartel – with railway magazines in the photo. There are many opportunities as good as this in our newsagency and, I am sure, other newsagencies.

Key to our calendar offer is our broad range so it is important for us to pitch this where it is likely to have the most impact. There is a definite correlation between magazine sales and calendar sales.

Calendars have started arriving an they are selling, even at this early stage.  We are getting them out as soon as they come in – you can’t sell stock from the back room.  The race is to convert the value of the stock to cash before the account is due.

We have customers who have preordered from us on the basis of the extensive range we carried last year.

Our calendar sales were up 38% last year.  We anticipate double digit growth this year based on our buying decisions and how the other key departments are travelling.

We do not plan on discounting calendars until 2010.  This was our policy for the last calendar season and it worked for us – in the face of discounting in our centre.