Great things come in small stores

After meeting the SmartCompany team in Melbourne recently, I’ve been pondering those stores that are pioneering great shopper experience without the huge funds required to sweep across a network of hundreds of stores.

Of course, it’s harder to prove the ROI in these examples. Retail figures aren’t available for reference, but each time I’ve been into one of these stores, it has been a good experience. Based on that, I’m going to bet that there are stores out there making a massive success of challenging retail times, purely because they’re delivering something special for the shopper.

So how are they doing it?

In the quest to deliver the best possible experience for the shopper (not “the best results for my brand” or “the best display for my store”) the rules of engagement are the same regardless of footprint of network breadth.

Shoppers behave the same way when entering Woolworths as they do when entering Smiggle or their local City Convenience store. Regardless of where they are or what they enter to buy, shoppers will still stay longer and spend more if they’re “getting good aisle”, to quote the words of retail anthropologist, Paco Underhill.

Smiggle is one of the newer players in the Australian retail sphere, born in 2003 and now with about 55 stores across Australia.

It does its job exceptionally well, offering a small range of products uniquely positioned in the stationery space. The company describes its product as “fashion forward stationery” and they do deliver exactly that! Brightly coloured, designed to coordinate and in seasonal ranges.

Smiggle says that visiting a store should be “like a hug from your best friend”. And that’s the “giving good aisle” moment. When a customer enters a Smiggle store, they are greeted by friendly, accommodating staff who engage within moments of entering the store, and who know all there is to know about creating a visual appeal with stationery, something you just can’t get when you buy your new pens and notepads in other retail environments.

Displays are bright, simple and low, showing customers the full landscape of the store.
In essence, Smiggle gets its customers 100%.

And that’s what it’s all about.

Dinosaur Designs does too. Once a stand-alone designer fashion jewellery store and brainchild of two Sydney artists, it is now a chain of high-end accessories stores that woo shoppers in from before you even enter (the fabulous door handles are designed by the artists in the style of the jewellery within). Customers are drawn to brilliant and uniquely artistic displays and staff have been known to lay out 100 or more items on the huge counters, just so a customer can pick a favourite. Nothing is too much trouble, and customers know it.

The growth of this chain is testament to its success, with stores now across Australia, all still offering handmade resin jewellery at a premium price.

In the completely opposite end of town, Lonely Planet is about to blitz the travel world, having launched its first flagship store at Sydney airport. I stopped by to check it out. I loved the honesty of the products and the environment, which stay close to the heritage of the origins of the business; backpackers writing travelogues to help the backpackers following them. It even made me think about a holiday involving travel – an achievement considering how much time I already spend in the air!

Obviously the core product is books, displayed beautifully across walls and in an open store format. But it’s the essence of the world in a store that really appeals. The maps, the images of exotic places… And it is highly relevant to its core shopper, with carefully selected items that complement the core product and that can’t be purchased just down the road at the travel luggage store.

More stores are due in the coming year and one can only assume that they will grow fast and furious – even in slow travel times.

Casting the net wider for examples in the mass market, let’s talk about the successes of City Convenience stores. This Sydney chain entered the convenience sector 11 years ago, and by dint of simple colour fields, clean lines, bright interiors and small ranges of items that matched the shopping hours of time-poor cash-rich metro dwellers, struck a chord. They haven’t moved away from the model and now appear on almost every Sydney street corner. They’ve becomes Australians’ own 7-Eleven.

But great shopper experience can even happen in the tiniest of stores.

I stopped by a small independent café last week in Randwick, Teascapes, and was delighted to discover free WiFi – just as McDonalds has done and I have previously raved about. It’s great to see even the smallest stores offering a somewhat expensive value-add for customers and reaping the benefits. No wonder the store was full of young people on laptops and iPhones drinking their coffee after hours.

You can never be too small to invest in your shopper. Plain and simple, it will bring you more shoppers, more frequently spending more money in your store. Keep the faith!

In his role as CEO of CROSSMARK, Kevin Moore looks at the world of retailing from grocery to pharmacy, bottle shops to car dealers, corner store to department stores. In this insightful blog, Kevin covers retail news, ideas, companies and emerging opportunities in Australia, NZ, the US and Europe. His international career in sales and marketing has seen him responsible for business in over 40 countries, which has earned him grey hair and a wealth of expertise in international retailers and brands. CROSSMARK Asia Pacific is Australasia’s largest provider of retail marketing services, consulting to and servicing some of Australasia’s biggest retailers and manufacturers.

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