Your Life Your Style versus Your Life Your Style

It’s a challenging time for shopkeepers. Retail sales are stagnant while costs are rising rapidly. And worst of all, I'm in competition with myself.
Let me explain. By day I’m Dr Jekyll running my shop Your Life Your Style in the centre of Winchester. As night falls, I become Mr Hyde the online entrepreneur with my website YourLifeYourStyle.co.uk. As Dr Jekyll, I’m a respectable member of the local community, paying rent and taxes that date from the economic boom, and actually serving real local people. As Mr Hyde, I can go like a mercenary wherever the costs are low- on an out-of-town industrial estate or an Enterprise Zone. I can even set up on the Channel Islands and sell my lower priced products free of VAT.
Mr Hyde’s online retail business also benefits from not needing a shop floor to display products or paying staff who stand around waiting for a customer. The work of picking and packing in a warehouse can be spread throughout the day (or would that be night in Mr Hyde’s case?). I say this knowing that online trading has challenges of its own- competition on a scale that a bricks-and-mortar shop never faces. It's a Wild West in which many manufacturers are joining in and selling direct to the public. The consequence is usually lower prices than shops charge, even allowing for shipping and the huge marketing costs involved in getting yourself noticed on the web.

Of course, my online business is run from the back of my Winchester shop so it doesn’t benefit as much as some but even so it’s far more profitable per square foot than the front end. I'm not alone in having a dual personality. There's hardly a shop business around that doesn't also trade online, trying to get a foothold on the new world before the old one crumbles beneath them. 

It sometimes seems inevitable that Mr Hyde will eventually stand alone across much of the retail landscape with Dr Jekyll retaining only a few flagship shops in key locations like London’s Oxford Street or Winchester’s High Street. My only hope for the good doctor and the many customers who still like to shop in person is a major revision of rents and rates to realistic levels. Of course I am writing these words of encouragement during the daytime. In a few hours, when darkness has descended, I fear my hands will once again be stained with shopkeepers' blood.
A version of this article also appeared on Wordpress

Your Life Your Style or Your Wife's Store Trial?

For years I thought Jimi Hendrix in the song Purple Haze said, ‘Excuse me while I kiss this guy’ when in fact it was the much less obvious ‘while I kiss the sky.’ I’m not alone- a survey last year showed that this was the second most misheard song lyric. The first being from REM’s Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight. You probably thought Michael Stipe sings ‘Calling Jamaica’- I know I did- whereas in fact he says very quickly ‘Call me when you try to wake her.’

By the way, did you know the Sidewinder referred to in the song is an old fashioned telephone, so called because it has a coiled cord like a Sidewinder snake? Probably not. Since none of us knew what the song was about anyway, I don’t think we can be blamed for getting the words wrong.

When you’re in business, clarity is vital, as it’s very easy to upset a customer with a wrong impression. I remember when I worked at a theatre, I received a complaint from a customer about the bad language used in front of children by the Fairy Godmother in apparently criticising the orchestra. I was puzzled, so I took a further look at the pantomime and heard the Fairy actually say, ‘What a funky band!’

It’s so easy to mishear what someone says. I still cringe at the time I was on the phone to my health insurance company about my hernia. ‘What size is it?’ said the woman on the other end of the phone. My mind raced over possibilities like a golf ball (too big) or a marble (too small) when the image of a quail’s egg popped into my head. I have no idea why- I don’t eat or even like quail’s eggs- and as soon as I said it I realised I sounded like the most pretentious snob. All the worse when she responded, ‘No, what side is it?’
These thoughts about mishearing came to me because of yet another thing I misheard last week. To give a bit of background, Winchester, where we are located, has a few problems with late night drunkenness, which is bad for our image and can be a physical threat to late night revellers. The presence of adults is known to calm situations down.

So I was pleased when one of our young employees at Your Life Your Style told me how she came out of a club late one night to be offered a cup of tea by some Christians. I thought she added ‘And Jews had coffee.’ Before I dwelt too long on the prospect of some wonderful multi-faith activity in which perhaps the Muslims were there too handing out cocoa, I realised she actually said, ‘and juice and coffee.’

It reminds me of a humorous greetings card I saw in which the wife is saying, 'You only hear what you want to hear' to which the husband responds, 'Thanks I'll have a beer.'

This article has also appeared on the Southern Daily echo website and on Wordpress

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit At Jeanette Winterson's Small Shop

Previously my only awareness of Jeanette Winterson was as the author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Now I know she's a fellow retailer and a passionate defender of the small local shop. Her article in The Observer last Sunday told how her house has a shop below called Verde which she has made into a cafe and greengrocer in keeping with its location in Spitalfields, which was once the home of London's wholesale fruit and veg market. Ms Winterson makes some interesting points about why it is difficult for small local shops to thrive. Here are a a few extracts.
On the economics of small shops: 'In Britain, running a small food shop is really hard work. We do not do as other countries in Europe and implement a sliding business rate, so Verde has to pay the same money as an estate agent or mobile phone agent.'
On the blandness of the big chains: 'I don't like the chilly world of corporate retail... I prefer individuality and eccentricity and self-determination- all the things the free market is supposed to deliver and never does, because markets soon become homogenous and anti-competitive.'
Tellingly she describes the 'new austerity Britain' as 'a country where the Post Office can't be subsidised but banks can, and where we all have to pay more, except the big businesses which are going to be allowed tax breaks to "revitalise the economy".'
Well said.

Small Businesses Pick Up The Crumbs

The well known 80/20 rule says that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your products and if you cut out the 80% and concentrate on the 20%, 80% of the sales of remaining products will come from 20% and so on.
This is one reason why the internet is wonderful for small businesses. While the big companies are chasing the 20%, you can go 'under the radar' and make a business out of the other 80% by targeting niche markets.
There are two problems which I find when trying this approach with our own website Your Life Your Style. Firstly, it can be a lot of administration for a small number of sales. You spend the same amount of time loading up text and imgaes whetehr a product sells in the ones or the thousands. Secondly, to reach these niche markets with key words, links, social networking and Google AdWords is very expensive in time and money for the return. But, as we have found, if you get it right there are enough crumbs to make a decent loaf.
By the way, the 80/20 rule applies to all sorts of aspects of life. For example, iIt seems most of us only use 20% of the clothes in our wardrobe 80% of the time.

Sale Away

The Sales seem to be over pretty quickly this year. Helped no doubt by the Big Freeze, we at Your Life Your Style found that the bargain hunters had dried up by the first week in January and most of our sales were once again full priced gifts and accessories.

We prefer the John Lewis 'clearance' approach, genuinely selling off stock cheaply that we have too much of. I don't like the cynical exploitation of a genuine need favoured by some retailers who buy stock specially for a Sale.
Either way, I imagine Sales did as well for other retailers as for us this year because unlike last year there was very little of the pre-Christmas panic discounting going on and consumers were probably wanting to get their purchases done before VAT went up.

Draught Excluder Sales Boom In Big Freeze

As my mother said to me when I was a little boy and down in the dumps, 'When one door closes, another one opens.' Actually she said, 'When one door closes, another one slams in  your face' but then she always had a good dose of Yorkshire cynicism.
Here's another saying my mother favoured: 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket'. Good business advice. It's true that when things go wrong, there is usually an opportunity you hadn't noticed before because you were too busy with things going right. But a shrewd business person will prepare for the bad days. When I was a clothing retailer, I sold t-shirts on hot days and lined jackets when it was cold, wide brimmed hats when it was sunny and wellington boots when it rained.

These last few days our shop in Winchester has suffered from the Big Freeze and everybody not venturing out onto the slippery roads and pavements. On the other hand our Your Life Your Style website has been doing a roaring trade in Dora Designs animal draught excluders. So much so that our total turnover is actually well up on the same time last year.
'Every cloud has a silver lining' as my mother no doubt would have said.

The Price Is Right

I love, actually I need to start the working day with a coffee. To be precise, a latte from Costa. And every day I can’t believe I’m paying £2 for a takeaway coffee. How did the coffee houses persuade us to pay such an outrageous price which appears to bear no relation to cost?

To be fair, when we price products for our gift shop Your Life Your Style, it’s not as simple as taking the cost and applying a standard percentage mark up. There are a number of factors we take into account. As I always tell businesses who consult me, you first must consider the market and set a price appropriate to it.

As retailers, we have little say over the product’s position in the market, so we move straight on to how many we expect to sell and how much customers are willing to pay. At Your Life Your Style, we rarely expect to sell products on a mass scale because we offer special gifts and accessories.

However, if we can sell a reasonable number, we can afford a lower margin and make the profit we need through scale. Going back to my old theatre marketing days, I think of the example of Christmas pantomime where the type of audience and the numbers who attend allow for lower prices than for, say, a musical.

On the other hand, if the market is more niche, it is necessary to charge more. Opera comes to mind as a case where, at least when I was trying to sell it, no matter how cheap you made the tickets, there were only so many people interested in buying. At Your Life Your Style, we may go for a higher than average profit margin if we know a product is unique and may take some time to shift.

Of course, how people themselves value the product will have a big influence. And this is where it gets more complicated. Marketing, word-of-mouth and the intrinsic qualities of the product will potentially affect a consumer’s attitude to a product. They may have an emotional attachment to it or make a rational decision about its quality or simply want to show off that they have the taste or money to purchase it. Whatever the reason, if a customer believes the product to be exceptional or life enhancing, they will pay a premium for it.

This is why we don’t automatically charge the lowest price we can afford based on cost. A cheap price means to many people an inferior product because that is what they’ve learned from experience. No doubt Chanel could charge less but their customers want to buy an expensive perfume. In fact, perfume manufacturers and other fashion brands like Levi have fought hard to stop their products being discounted and thereby ‘cheapened’.

Back to coffee (and I am beginning to feel like another latte), Starbucks managed to persuade us that we were getting something special. Special beans, specially roasted, freshly ground, customised to your taste and in a social club atmosphere. Hence the special price. Then everybody started imitating it but the strange thing is, the more popular premium coffee became, the more the price should have come down. Yet it didn’t.

Initially Costa and the rest wanted to show they were the same quality as Starbucks, so they matched the prices. Even so, in all the years since, no-one has broken ranks and reduced prices. I read that at a blind tasting people preferred McDonalds coffee to Starbucks but it will take some persuading people that you don’t always get what you pay for.

Knowing the price people will pay forces Your Life Your Style reluctantly to turn down some excellent products where the cost is too high, taking into account all our overheads. For example, we have found that some (not all) products hand crafted in Britain are so expensive to produce that the retail price looks hugely expensive when compared with either something handcrafted in the third world or something mass produced. Every product must earn the time and space it takes up.

There is always an element of trial and error in pricing. We know there is a tipping point at which a product sells, so it’s easier to start with a higher price first and, if the product doesn’t sell, lower it. This then gives us the opportunity to employ the other great pricing tool- the bargain. Some more cynical businesses deliberately charge a high price to establish that something has a value, not expecting the product to sell, then cut the price. This way, people don’t see it as ‘cheap’ but rather a ‘bargain’.

We prefer to price fairly from the start, because we know that customers have no respect for cynical businesses. Their spend with a gift-cum-lifestyle shop like ours is entirely discretionary so we need their respect. To me, getting the price right is a constantly challenging element of running a business. There is no easy formula but if you get it wrong, all your other good work goes out the window.

Small Is Beautiful In A Recession

High street shops in the UK are struggling. Shoppers, worrying about the pound in their pockets, seem to be turning their backs on the throwaway products mass produced in China. By contrast, sales at our independent 'lifestyle' shop in Winchester and on our website yourlifeyourstyle.co.uk are actually increasing.

In a recession, value is what people look for, and that doesn't automatically mean 'cheap'. We concentrate on stocking products that are beautifully designed and made to last. We have found that our customers recognise Britain as a world leader in the quality of its design and craft. They see handmade British products as something of lasting value, something that will make a special gift. We have responded by launching a Made In The UK collection on the website.

It's a joy to see and touch hand crafted wooden flowers by Martin Jones of High Wycombe, fused glass bowls and coasters by Jo Downs of Cornwall, Yorkshire based Rosie Soul’s jewellery, Naturaleigh of Dorset’s organic soaps, fabric door stops and notice boards by Pins And Ribbons from the North East and top London designer Margo Selby’s scarves and clutch bags.

They're all people with an artistic eye and the skill to create lasting beauty with their hands. Just looking at one of their creations is a delight. But when you touch it and feel the care and attention put into it, it's like a personal contact with the maker.

What is also crucially important is that they are part of a new breed of crafts men and women who are serious business people. They want to satisfy a growing market and understand that retail success requires consistency and competitive pricing.

It may not be a bad thing for Britain's high streets to be cleared of some of the dross that people bought when they were encouraged to consume for its own sake. The recession is a real opportunity for retailers and producers who can offer something of quality and value.