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!

Kettle Apartheid At Tescos?

This newspaper ad for Tesco shows just how careful you need to be when you write copy. Apart from the obvious things like checking spelling, always look for double or unintended meanings. It's a very good idea to get someone else to look at and read out loud your copy. Unless of course these Tesco appliances are aimed at black students.

I'm always amused by the Massive Rug Sales advertised locally. What if you want a small rug? I've missed a few when advertising products in my shop Your Life Your Style. For example, what is a 'woollen picnic' as in 'Woollen Picnic Rug'? Maybe everyone going on the picnic has wear a woolly.

Who Do You Trust on the Web?

It seems pornographers have the same problems as any other businesses once they gain a bad reputation. Pretty much everyone is wary of porn websites because of the bad practices of some. The U.S. industry generally, anxious to hold on to the 40 million Americans who view pages with adult content regularly, have made great efforts to ensure their sites are free from scams and malware. So successful have they been that a Web Of Trust blog  tells us that while 'adult entertainment websites' account for 12% of the total number of web pages (1 in 6) a study has found that there are 99 infected mainstream web pages for every one infected adult web page, making the safety ratio 99:1. It seems those of us who avoid adult websites and think we're safe shouldn't be so complacent.
Web Of Trust or WOT is a great way to use the wisdom of crowds as a guide to websites. You can download it as an app for various browsers and better still join WOT and register your own scores and comments on the websites you visit.

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.

Diesel Ad Campaign Far From Stupid

Congratulations to Diesel on a great advertising campaign culminating with the perfect result- a ban by the Advertising Standards Authority. Ban aside, Diesel's poster/print ad campaign is well worth a look for its humorous concept (who cares about those clever types, it's good to be stupid), perfect targeting (people who think of themselves as young and individualistic) and immaculate execution (beautifully set up and shot tableaux). And it shows off the product.

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.

England's Role Model Manager

England goalkeeper David James talking about the manager Fabio Capello in The Guardian: "He keeps everything clear for the team, you don't have any ambiguous situations. He gives the players the environment to work in, he arms us with the knowledge of the opposition and he trusts that the ability we have is good enough to beat that opposition." It seems to me that's a pretty good definiton of the role of the manager.
I've always found that the best managers have a clear vision and provide their people with the tools, knowledge and support to succeed. That's what I've always tried to do but it's not as easy as it sounds.
Your clear vision can easily get clouded with day-to-day distractions and compromises; tools can be expensive and it's not always easy to be sure which will really work; in order to provide knowledge, you need to have it yourself and to be sure which is relevant; supporting people should be easy but it's even easier to criticise.

Get In Touch With Your Feminine Side

80% of purchasing decisions are made by women (according to research by Iris). That means those of us working in marketing who are not women need to think like them. That could apply to some female marketers as well.

What I do is research what women are saying in magazines, social media and TV to get a handle of what is of interest and way they express themselves. The thing is though, you can't fake it. You have to immerse yourself, be the part, or you just sound like someone speaking a foreign language who doesn't quite understand the idioms.

If in doubt, play it straight. Don't use language which is going to sound false- like the dad in Modern Family trying to ingratiate himself with his kids. Better to use neutral phrases. The main thing is understanding what is important to the people who are your customers.

How To Manage Your Privacy On Facebook

As a retailer, I know there are many legal requirements to protect and not misuse personal data. Not so the social networks like Facebook because people voluntarily give up their information. This article in the New York Times shows how managing your privacy on Facebook involves 50 settings and 170 options and a privacy policy longer than the US constituion.
You can argue that the Facebook guys just want us to have the maximum number of options when it comes to sharing our personal information. Then again, given that the company has come in for a lot of criticism after stalkers, paedophiles and others have used Facebook for nasty purposes, you'd think it might be better advised to assume that everybody wants maximum privacy and to let people opt in to the various levels of sharing.

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.

Too Much Of A Good Marketing Thing

One of the world’s leading internet retailers is bombarding me with emails. A weekly update on their latest offers and new products would be OK. But daily? This is spam, no matter how good the targeting is. It’s a classic marketing mistake and is bound to lead to people blocking their emails. That includes me, much as I like buying from this company.
At Your Life Your Style, we email about once a month, which may not be enough to keep us constantly on our customers' radar, but I'd rather that than become unwelcome in the inbox.