The latest part for the Elvis partwork is appropriately Christmas themed. We are using this as an opportunity to pitch it as a gift idea for the season. The calendar and CD are a good-value gift priced at $19.95. It is good to find Christmas gift ideas in regular products we carry to extend the Christmas gift range we have brought in.
With school classes drawing to a close for the year, now is a good time to feature gifts for teachers. This day to a page desk calendar is at the high end of such gifts we have. There are photo frames, fridge magnets, journals, key rings – plenty of gifts for teachers from which to choose. Our experience is that parents often buy gifts for their kids to give to teachers so it makes sense that we cater to this market in newsagencies. While the end of the school year is no back to school season for us, most items sold are at a considerably better margin.
A challenge for newsagents in this changing market is to find ways to support new categories with existing fixturing designed around the newsagency of yesteryear. We have been fortunate to find opportunities to display gifts adjacent to or near our card department. This makes sense given that just about every card sold could be sold with a gift. The slim unit we have hanging at the end of one card stand is selling well at Forest Hill. These keepsake type trinkets work with our demographic. We are still feeling our way with adding fixtures to our stores which find extra display space for us. The key is for the placement to be a natural fit.
These small owls are a successful new product we have found for our Frankston newsagency. Without any special promotion of feature location, they have sold well – outside the traditional graduation season. We sought a range of graduation gifts given that we sell plenty of cards around the event. The owls work because we are moving more to a
We are launching a TV commercial on channels Seven and Ten in
We are supporting the ad with the delivery of high quality flyers to homes around three of our locations in the last week of this month.
This is the first advertising we have undertaken for Sophie since we opened at Forest Hill in February last year. With our Toorak store opening two months ago we felt the time was right to step out with our unique and personal offer.
We hope to release details of the Sophie franchise model in then first quarter of next year.
This is smart – gift cards displayed in front of magazines. While we usually display card products at the counter in newsagencies in Australia, it is the magazine display which gets more eyeball attention – think of how long some people spend browsing. I took this photo at a 7-eleven in Hong Kong. With space so limited here, retailers are smart at embracing every opportunity.
We can easily embrace this for use in Australia.
Some of my team from Tower Systems have just returned from a busy Gift Fair in Auckland. As we experienced here in Australia, the gift marketplace is very active. Suppliers and retailers are busy building stronger businesses. In NZ we saw plenty of newsagent type businesses looking at gifts. As in Australia, they are achieving good growth from this category. Gifts are a great way to deepen the basket with good margin product in a newsagency.
Compendium is supplier I’d recommend to newsagents looking to get into the gift or social stationery category. Their books, cards, booklets and other items are an excellent add-on to a greeting card purchase. We sell them in two of my newsagencies and they work very well. We actually started dealing with Compendium through our Sophie Randall gift shops. The Compendium range works for Sophie customers too.
I like that the Compendium products are well merchandised – this makes it easy to move around the store. Their various products are space efficient too. This enables us to fit them almost anywhere. For example, we bring it to the counter for a week or two, then move to the card aisle and then in the gift area.
Tower Systems yesterday completed its third Gift Fair trade show this year. What has been extraordinary to us is the number of newsagents now attending these events. Gifts is clearly one of the fastest growing categories in newsagencies – if the number of newsagents spending money at the trade show which ended yesterday in Sydney is anything to go by. This is great to see. Expanding into a new category such as gifts is vitally important for newsagents. There are new skills such as ranging, pricing and displaying to learn which are unique to the category. There is also the responsibility for firm sale ordering – with much of what newsagents sell out of their direct control, those playing in gifts will be well skilled for a good future.
Within a season like Father’s Day we can either display everything we have as a broad offer or segment our displays by theme or use of the gifts. The photo shows one such segmentation our Frankston team created around BBQ gifts. This brings together products from several suppliers including a BBQ themed Father’s Day card. The challenge is whether to theme for Father’s Day like this or place the whole offer together. We are lucky at Frankston to have the room to do both, our theme displays work well on a column in the shop while the broader display works on tables nearby.
Click here to see a copy of the latest newsletter we have produced for our Sophie Randall businesses. We place new issues each month in a stand in front of each shop – going through around 200 a month. We are quite passive about distribution – we do not hand them to customers from the counter or mail them. This newsletter is designed specifically for passers-by. It works. Customers come in that day or sometime later and ask about featured product.
We are now at the business end of Father’s Day, the last week when somewhere between 60% and 90% of Father’s Day purchases are made. We have a story across the front of the shop as well as deep inside across a variety of product categories – cards, gifts, confectioners, lotteries, magazines, books and stationery.
The photo does not capture the full range. To some it may look a little hodge podge. It does look much better in person.
We have sought to demonstrate the range we offer as well as the value of our offer. Father’s Day is no Mother’s Day when it comes to card and related sales. Our in-store efforts are working against that, hence our full-throated display.
Sales are already excellent, showing that going early with a season can work very well, even for Father’s Day.
We opened our fourth Sophie Randall store yesterday at 211 Toorak Road, Toorak. This store presented some real design challenges – it is only 60 square metres, round in shape, street fronted and has a column in the middle of the space.
Our first two designs fought against the odd shape. It was only after we embraced the circular shape that we came up with the fan approach for cards.
We have grouped card giving occasions by modules and even thought we have only been open a day, customers appear to like this approach.
The learnings from making the Sophie model fit into a smaller space will now be applied to our other stores. These retrofit changes will also include finessing of our corporate image in the windows and new fixturing for our feature cards.
As we have done for all of our Sophie stores, we used Zone Design out of Melbourne. They are innovative and deliver a good outcome.
Earlier this year I blogged about these newspaper themed mugs which I expected to sell well in our newsagencies. I was premature in declaring them a success. We now have them at half price in an effort to quit the range. We will drop the price ever further next week. We have moved them between stores and created dazzling displays. Nothing worked. We are pleased to have tried and had the experience though.
Tower Systems has a stand at the Reed Gift Fair in Melbourne this weekend and through until Wednesday. If yesterday was anything to go by it will be a ripper of as success. While we are there primarily to talk to gift shops about our software, we have met with plenty of newsagents already.
A couple of newsagents I talked with yesterday made the same observation – this is the kind of fair newsagents should attend as they will see product here they will never see at a newsagent trade show.
It’s great to see so many newsagents researching the gift category. Given the size of this fair it would be hard to come away without any new products to try. While I was at the our part of the Fair yesterday I saw several suppliers offering product which I’d like us to sell in our newsagencies.
To walk a show this size properly will take at least two days. Thankfully, we have several on the team for our newsagencies and gift shops to cover the area. From what I saw yesterday there is plenty of new product and some excellent deals.
The small pads in the photo are from For Arts Sake. They and a similar pad product from the same supplier are among the best counter sellers we have tried in the last year. They are attractive and have a good price point – crucial elements to a successful counter offer. Customers have top be able to make a quick decision. The challenge with counter offers is finding different yet compelling product. That’s where getting to gift fairs is important, to look beyond traditional newsagency suppliers.
I am often asked by newsagents where they can fit gifts into their shops. The photo shows what we do at Frankston on one aisle end. We have two other displays like this as well as gifts elsewhere in the shop. The display is changed every couple of weeks. In the photo we have a selection of social stationery, Jamie Oliver mugs and plush sitting on boxes. The idea is for card buyers to see gifts which could work with the occasion for which they are purchasing. Once we have completed our shop fit we will have better fixturing opportunities for gifts.
Work started three days ago on a new Sophie Randall card and gift shop in Toorak. This will be our fourth Sophie store, the first opened in February last year.
This shop has its challenges: 60 sq metres, round in shape, 70% of all walls glass, two entrances, no back room and a column right where we don’t want it. It presents tremendous opportunities: great demographic, village shopping feel, being small, being right on the street and an opportunity to play with the Sophie model.
More newsagencies are developing plans which draw on the Sophie experience. We have a some fixtures designed specifically for us which some newsagents have installed in their businesses with our permission and they are helping develop good gift and social stationery departments. One reason we started Sophie was to gain experience which could play well in traditional newsagencies.
Since we placed the collection of small spinners of frames, magnets, keepsakes and similar items on a table near our front window they have worked better for us. Previously these spinners were a pain in the neck and spread across the card department. Now, they have a home and are easier to shop and maintain. It’s basic retail really. The alternative of one bigger spinner to house them all is no good because then we can’t locate one spinner at the counter or elsewhere for a short time to boost sales.
The new Swobbles range from Skansen in our window at Forest Hill is working a treat. The bright coloured fun looking animals are drawing attention to the shop and driving some good sales. It helps that school holidays has started. Since the window is in front of our card department there is a nice flow on there too.
Gifts can be a challenge for newsagents since consumers when thinking about gifts do not think of us. Some newsagents do an amazing job with gifts while others flounder. It is a category which requires constant attention from buying through to display. Regular product movement is key, so shoppers always find something new.
The real challenge for newsagents is that the gift departments requires you to be a retailer whereas magazine, papers, lotteries and even cards, to a lesser extent, can work without you being a retailer.
The display looks much better than my photo (taken outside the shop) shows.
When I saw the items a customer was purchasing on Friday last week I had to take a photo as it was a perfect example of the newsagency working across multiple categories to build a better basket.
The customer was buying Country Style magazine, a birthday card and a small inspirational booklet from Compendium. Total value in excess of $17.00 – considerably more than our average sale value.
In choosing gift and gift related items to add to our newsagencies we focus on card giving occasions, especially those which lend themselves to impulse purchases. Adding value to card sales is easy if we buy well for the business. This does not mean we ignore basket building opportunities around other categories of products – cards are the easier opportunity.
Old style marketers tell newsagents to pitch up-sell opportunities across the counter and to use noisy posters to promote discounts and the like. While there is a place for the old school noisy approach occasionally, sustained business growth comes from smart buying and even smarter product placement. In the case of the inspirational booklets, we have them on display as you enter the card aisle. This adjacency is smart, the shop pitches the up-sell for us, the customer makes their own choice without any pressure.
We track basket performance in our Tower Systems software. This helps us improve on our own performance and drive more efficient sales.
The team at our Frankston newsagency has claimed ownership of the new range of Jamie Oliver mugs we have. Each mug has a saying like I’m Single, Dead Handsome, I’m Cooking. Someone at our newsagency has allocated mugs to team members based on these sayings. They are great gift, a perfect add-on to a card purchase. I really like the personalisation of the display at Frankston.
