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

The Writing's On The Wall- Banksy Inspires Your Life Your Style

I’ll be rooting for the graffiti artist Banksy to win an Oscar tomorrow for his documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop. I find his work on outdoor walls inspiring. Don’t worry, I haven’t bought a hooded jacket and a spray can of paint. The streets of Winchester are safe, from me at least.
It’s more about the way he thinks. He shares with great artists of the past the ability to look at an everyday object or scene and find in it something meaningful that the rest didn’t see.
It’s the same kind of eye that enabled Michelangelo to look at a piece of marble that had baffled even other artists and see in it a sculpture of David or Picasso to look at an old bike’s saddle and handlebars and see a goat’s head.
Like Southampton last year, Los Angeles, home of the Oscars, is currently benefiting from Banksy’s imaginative street art, such as the wall of a burnt out building that featured a smiling Charlie Brown with a petrol can and a cigarette.
My favourite is a large poster for a Las Vegas hospitality company which he has transformed into a scene of debauchery featuring a drugged up Minnie Mouse and a drunken Mickey cavorting with the bikini clad woman of the original advertisement. It says a lot about the gap between people’s fantasies and the reality of the high life.
One of my best Christmas presents was a book of Banksy’s art called Wall and Piece. It has given me a lot of inspiration in my work as a retailer. What he and other artists demonstrate is that, by taking the everyday and transforming it, you can create much more attention grabbing, emotionally engaging displays or websites. And if you can do it with humour all the better.
I don’t claim the windows of Your Life Your Style are great art but, when our designer Lyn recently positioned a little paperweight mouse peeking out of a faux fur slipper, she created something that was more than just a display of two products, and that at least nodded in the direction of artists like Banksy.

This article appeared in the Southern Daily Echo

The Naked Truth About Advertising and Underwear

This time of year our shop Your Life Your Style is full of hearts. Glass coasters with hearts fused into them, heart shaped cushions, handmade cards with stuck on hearts… other shops have enough flowers, chocolates and romantic CDs to fill Westminster Abbey. All intended to show we love someone this coming Monday.
Underwear seems a popular choice as a Valentines Day gift but I’m not certain it’s a good idea. I’ve been wondering how men who receive Marks & Spencer’s new BodyMax underwear will feel. To remind you, this is a new range intended to make a man’s abs more flat, his bum more firm, and his maleness… just plain more. All those years your wife or girlfriend has been saying size doesn’t matter and suddenly she buys you ‘frontal enhancement’ underpants.
It's worse still if you buy them for yourself. The trouble with all these body changing clothes, for men or women, is that, once you’ve attracted your potential mate with a bulging crotch or uplifted padded boobs, there comes an inevitable moment of truth. Your pants go down and the mountain brings forth a mouse. The bra comes off and your man’s face drops along with a couple of other things. I suppose we hope that by then our partner will be so overcome by passion, they’ll forgive the deception. Or maybe we just make rely on everything looking better by candlelight.
In business we have no such luxury. The law doesn’t allow us to pretend our product or service is one thing and then hope once the customer has bought it, they’ll just accept the disappointing reality. Nor would it be good business sense. Contrary to a widespread public perception, advertising is not about lying. The industry regulator the Advertising Standards Authority even says in its core statement that advertisements in print, TV and radio must be ‘honest, decent and legal’. It’s about to get tougher for businesses because from 1st March the ASA is taking on complaints about websites.
Shops shouldn’t need legislation to make us honest because truth is our biggest marketing tool. I've always found that if you are honest about your products, describing them accurately, admitting their limitations, even sending customers elsewhere if that is their best bet, and apologising when you get something wrong, your customers will trust you and come back to you again and again.
These days, all good websites allow customers to comment on products and service from the mighty Amazon to our own little (and only slightly enhanced) Your Life Your Style. We don’t always like what is said but it shows customers we have nothing to hide and it is an additional spur to be clear and accurate about what we promise.
Of course you can’t satisfy everybody and we’re all entitled to an opinion. One customer gave a poor review to our ‘rabbit’ draught excluder. There was nothing wrong with its quality but she didn’t like his slightly mad expression! Still, at least we didn’t pretend it was a bigger size.

This article also appeared on the Your Life Your Style Wordpress blog and on the Southern Daily Echo website

Steiff Bears and The Golden Age of Theatre

Last week London’s West End reported an attendance of over 14 million in 2010, missing last year's record by a whisker. A BBC report desribed a 'golden age of theatre'.

So why are we living in this golden age? Partly it’s the quality. If you provide cheap production values and lazy content, audiences stay home. By contrast, last year's West End’s hits are challenging plays and intelligent musicals. But the main reason is, I think, to do with it being live. We’re all aware nowadays of how packaged and mass produced so much of what we consume is, including entertainment. Consequently, there’s an appetite for things that are or appear to be authentic.

At one end of the spectrum, you see it in the popularity of ‘reality’ TV shows and a desire to see behind the celebrity masks. Elsewhere it’s the trend towards naturally produced food or, as I see in my shop Your Life Your Style, the demand for handmade products like Steiff bears and Dartington Glass. A theatrical performance, where we join a live audience to share in the real emotion communicated by actual people, is the organic wholemeal loaf of entertainment.

Whatever the reason for this golden age, it may soon be over. Cuts to arts funding are threatening many great producing theatres, local and national. So, enjoy it while you can.

This post also appeared on Wordpress and on the Daily Echo website in an extended version

Poets Inspire Your Life Your Style Customers

This article also appeared on the Southern Daily Echo website and on Paul's Shop Window on Wordpress:

With Valentines Day approaching, I’ve been busy updating the Romantic Quotes page of our website www.yourlifeyourstyle.co.uk. I introduced it to help inspire customers looking for words to go with their gifts. I know lots of us find it difficult to put our feelings into words. So often you end up with clichés or simply something that doesn’t really express what we really feel.
Great poets have the ability to find images and combinations of words that get to the heart of our emotions and make a connection with us. Apart from Shakespeare who unfortunately has become a cliché, I particularly like e.e. cummings’ poem that begins ‘I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)’ and Khalil Gibran’s ‘Life without love is like a tree without blossom and fruit.’
The best song lyrics do the same when they’re not rhyming ‘moon’ and ‘June’. I love the way Ira Gershwin expresses the way romantic love combines little things, memories and the deepest feelings:
‘The way you hold your knife / The way we danced til three / The way you changed my life / No, they can’t take that away from me.’ But then I am an old romantic.
Being romantic and funny is the hardest challenge. The late Hovis Presley had the Northern talent for veiling deep emotions with humour:
‘I rely on you like a camera needs a shutter / like a gambler needs a flutter / like a golfer needs a putter / like a buttered scone involves some butter / I rely on you’.
Even writers such as journalists or advertising copywriters, whose work is not likely to be remembered beyond the weekend, have to emulate the immortals by finding the right words and eschewing clichés if they want to make a connection with their readers. The greatest love of my working life has been writing copy but sadly I could never get near the genius of Ira Gershwin- or even Hovis Presley.
I always enjoy copywriting, so if you need any help with sales letters, press releases, website text or brochure copy, drop me an email at admin@yourlifeyourstyle.co.uk.

Are We Being Served?

This article first appeared in the Southern Daily Echo:
Customer service is flavour of the month. Last week Michel Roux Jr was on BBC2 teaching belligerent teenagers how to serve fine diners. This week Channel Four has Mary Portas Secret Shopper on a mission to improve standards of service on the high street.
For a retailer, Ms Portas’ TV programmes are required viewing. She has a proven record in shop displays and has become an expert in all aspects of retailing. The trouble with the first programme was that criticising the likes of Primark, Top Shop and Pilot was like shooting fish in barrel. Seeing staff ignore customers, overhearing them chatting about their private lives- these things are hardly shock revelations. Anyone familiar with these stories experiences this every time they go in.
I suspect the problem for many low price clothing chains is that they treat their staff with contempt and that’s passed on to the customers. Mary’s mantra of ‘Smile Speak Serve’ is quite right but too simplistic. It has to be backed up with training in customer psychology so they know when and what to say and even more importantly how to listen; product knowledge so they can genuinely help fulfil the customer’s requirements; involvement in the whole business so they understand the importance of their role in it; respect so they respect the management and customers; trust so they make the right decision for each unique customer without fear of criticism.
I know Mary’s expertise is in shop design but I think she let herself be distracted by the appearance of these cheap and cheerful shops. She criticised Primark for its queues and clothes on the floor. I suspect this is a deliberate tactic. I wouldn’t be surprised if they throw a few items on the floor themselves each morning and deliberately create queues, because it all creates an image of fast sales from frantic bargain hunters. On the other hand, even a bargain hunter may need help in finding a particular jacket or get annoyed if there’s a queue while members of staff are standing around chatting- and that does mean lost sales.
It’s all so much easier for a small family-run shop like Your Life Your Style. My wife and sister-in-law lead the staff by example. Shoulder to shoulder with employees, they greet customers, offer help when it’s needed and care about satisfying them whether that ends in a sale or not. Staff are praised when they do well and helped to improve where necessary. But big stores can do it too- look at John Lewis or Apple.
The biggest shame attaching to the owner of Pilot was not his rude staff or his shabby shop, it was the fact that his employees had never met him. How could he expect them to care about his business?

Recommend A Rival

This is what I wrote in the Southern Daily Echo today:

Here's the dilemma. An item is out of stock but you know your competition has one. Do you tell your customer or do you pretend your competition doesn't exist? What if you know your competition is cheaper? I recently had reason to be grateful to a rival shop. And, more surprisingly, I noticed ASDA had reason to thank Marks & Spencer.
Stylish Life not only sound quite like my shop Your Life Your Style, they also sell similar gifts. In particular they always come up alongside us in a Google search for Dora Designs animal door stops. Naturally I think of them as an arch rival. So I was pleasantly surprised to receive a telephone call from a customer wanting to buy a particular door stop, saying she had been recommended by Stylish Life.
It's an excellent idea because there's a good chance a customer will return to a shop they can trust to give them the best service, even if it means a lost sale.
But do you send customers to another shop when their prices are lower? These days many stores check and then match prices. We do it and it's what Marks & Spencer have been doing since they started selling branded groceries. Looking at their price comparisons the other day, I was taken aback to see a sign for Kelloggs Crunchy Nut Cornflakes saying M&S price £2.39, ASDA price £2.20.
It's one thing to send a customer elsewhere when you're out of stock but telling customers your shop has higher prices than your competition? My first reaction was that someone didn't follow through with a price match while someone else did follow through with the shelf ticket. But we are talking about the massive marketing resources of Marks & Spencer, so I think it must be deliberate. If I'd done it, my partner would calling for men in white coats but since this is M&S, it's clearly an incredibly brave and innovative marketing strategy. Anyway, where's the nearest ASDA?

Get Em Off! M&S Know How To Party

Move aside, Ann Summers. Not content with selling 'Frontal Enhancement' underpants that are padded to make one's manhood look bigger, Marks and Spencer now appear to be  pushing the idea of women partying in their underwear (see photo). It seems M&S are rapidly becoming the biggest sex shop on the high street. Perhaps their next move will be a change of name to S&M.

The sexiest thing we can offer at Your Life Your Style is a bathtime duck called Ducks Fizz!

The Big Society: Free Or Fee?

In a world where pay, pensions and bonuses dominate the headlines, it encourages me that people are still prepared to offer so much of their time for free. Even though we expect to get paid by our employers, we don't put a monetary value on time spent on our personal relationships: we don't bill the ironing or the cooking; we do jobs for family and friends for which we would charge strangers; we do charitable work.

Somewhere along the line, we decide that some of our activities must be paid for. In a way this makes of what previously must have been bartering. You might argue that these paid-for activities are the things we don't really want to do but that isn't always true as clearly many people enjoy their paid work (and say they would do it for nothing). Some people even turn their hobbies into paid work. It's not even that simple because the other side of the coin is that some people do things for free for family but really resent it.

All of which leads me to the interesting way in which a whole worldwide web community is happy to share their experiences of products and services with strangers for no monetary gain. Many send reviews to sites like Internet Movie Database or Whatsonstage. I myself am a member of the Web Of Trust which is an add-on for the Firefox browser. Members rate sites as trustworthy or otherwise and I find this very useful when I'm thinking of buying from an unknown supplier. What it shows is that most of us are social beings with an idea that we benefit from a system of indirect mutual support. The formal version of this might be paying taxes for, say, education.

In today's retail world, customer reviews, freely given, are very important. Even critical comments are good because they validate the praise. Customers are much more likely to buy if others have been impressed by the product. The Your Life Your Style website offers the opportunity for our customers to comment. They need to be encouraged with a follow up email and a click link but the investment is worth it.

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.

Sales Are In The Detail

A blog I always look at is Retail Details. It's a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration on how to improve your window displays, with lots of great photos of imaginative displays. Displays at the Your Life Your Style shop in Winchester are done by Lyn Knott who has a brilliant eye for colour and form.

Did Voters Find 'Posh Boys' Too Lightweight?

I have my own theory as to why neither David Cameron nor Nick Clegg did as well as expected. In my experience as a the owner of a shop Your Life Your Style, the recession has caused people to become more cautious in their buying, preferring nostalgia, simplicity and lasting quality.
If you apply this to the party leaders you can see why voters might have been worried that Cameron and Clegg were too young and inexperienced to handle the current grave situation. Brown, despite his many failings, is stolid and experienced. The 'posh boys' might have been the right choice when the living was easy but to take on the worst crisis in most of our lifetimes, the Tories and Lib Dems might have been better with old warhorses like Ken Clarke and Vince Cable.

All Dora Designs Animal Door Stops Are Equal But...

Returning to the theme of my last blog, Dora Designs animal door stops are a case in point. They are definitely among our 20% of products that are responsible for 80% of Your Life Your Style's sales. But once you analyse them, you find that 20% of the animals are responsible for 80% of the door stop sales.

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.

Help The High Street, Mr Darling

By any standards, my shop is a small business, yet because the rateable value is very high (the new level being £27,000), there's no business rate relief for us, even after the Budget increase in the qualification level. I find it hard to imagine the kind of high street shop that would have a rateable value of under £6000 and therefore gain business rates relief- a tiny newsagent in a deprived part of Liverpool perhaps.
Ironically, if we were to concentrate only on our online business, we could rent a smaller unit on an out-of-town industrial estate and would very likely be able to qualify for rates relief. Yet it's the high street that needs help. Perhaps square footage or turnover would provide better criteria for defining a small business.

The PR In Front Is Not Toyota

It's one of the basic rules of PR that if you’ve got a problem you admit everything, apologise and get on with fixing it preferably with generous compensation. Excuses, delays or, perish the thought, cover ups are always a mistake. Hard to believe then that a company as clever and experienced as Toyota could make such a mess of dealing with the technical problems with their cars.

At Your Life Your Style we needed to make some apologies just before Christmas. A couple of our deliveries went astray in the great freeze. As soon as customers informed us of the problem, we apologised and sent replacements along with a refund of the carriage cost and a small gift.

I like the way shops like Waitrose and M&S give you a refund and a replacement if you find something wrong with their food. Not so good was the service at Boots in Romsey last Sunday when I was waiting at the medicines counter. A pharmacist was busy nearby sorting prescriptions which I assumed he couldn’t leave unattended. An assistant at the next counter was involved in a long transaction. When she’d finished she came over only to say she wasn’t authorised to sell medicines. She went to get another assistant.

When I complained that I’d been waiting over five minutes, the new assistant said ‘You could have shouted or told the pharmacist.’ An astonishing response that assumed I knew the first assistant couldn’t serve me, that the pharmacist wouldn’t call someone without needing to be nudged and that I would want to be shouting ‘Shop!’ ‘Sorry’ was the one thing she wasn’t.

Is Packaging Your Guilty Pleasure?

We’ve just got in a bunch of lovely new Dora Designs products at Your Life Your Style. Nestled among the Dalmatian draught excluder, the poodle doorstop, the monkey bookends and curled cat paperweight are some new e-leather animal doorstops. E-Leather is a new eco-friendly kind of leather reconstituted from offcuts.

It set me thinking about how we’re all (well, most of us) guilty these days about the effect something we enjoy may have on the environment. It could be driving a car or buying imported vegetables. My own secret pleasure is packaging. For instance, I once bought a pair of Ted Baker underpants just because they came in a box with a lid that was held by a magnet. Most underpants seem to come in some kind of cardboard box even though we all know they could be piled up loose on a table.

My wife got some GHD hair straighteners. I don’t know if they really the best money can buy but their packaging certainly is. I am normally very good at recycling my packaging but I confess I can’t bring myself to throw that particular box away.

Maybe we always need the excitement of doing something wrong. People used to get a secret pleasure from looking at porn but that’s pretty open nowadays. Is packaging  porn for the 21^st century?

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.