3 minute read
Getting personal
How might a child describe what you do? A lot of time in meetings and nothing that exciting, I suspect!
What’s the biggest long-term challenge you face? The gradual creep of online, its effect on consumer behaviour and the viability of sizeable bricks-and-mortar stores. Selling a tactile does provide some protection, but technology and consumer expectations continue to change, and will alter that dynamic in the future.
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If you had 10 x your working budget, what would you spend it on? I would greatly increase spending on our digital offering, as the internet is no respecter of size – indeed, it favours the retail giants over small specialists. Consumers expect the website of an independent like us to match that of Furniture Village or DFS, when we can spend on it only a small fraction of what they can.
I would also look at how we grow the business through expansion. Steering a 165-year-old family business is not without challenge, but careful and modest growth has been one of the reasons why we are still trading successfully.
What would be the title of your autobiography? Credit Crunch, Recession, Global Pandemic & War in Europe – My Life in Retail.
What does ‘work/life balance’ mean to you? Ensuring that I give my best to the business in terms of commitment, leadership and progression, while also ensuring that I have the time to enjoy family life alongside that. Who’s been your most influential professional mentor? My father. We spent more than 15 years working side by side on a daily basis before he retired, and I learnt a great deal from his experiences of growing the business through the 1970s and 1980s. We had our disagreements along the way (which family business doesn’t?!), but most of the time we were ‘on the same page’.
etting Personal
PETER HARDING
Peter Harding is the MD of Fairway Furniture, the largest independent furniture retailer in the South West, operating five stores across Devon and Cornwall. www.fairwayfurniture.co.uk
What advice would you give your younger self? Dream more, take more risks, trust yourself.
What’s been your best day in business to date? There have been plenty over the 27 years since I joined the company. From a performance point of view, achieving record sales for the last financial year despite only being open for 9.5 months.
From a non-performance aspect, getting our St Austell store open for Boxing Day one year when it had been completely flooded just seven days earlier – or emerging from the pandemic in a stronger position and not having had to reduce headcount.
What’s the biggest myth about our industry? That it is a ‘cottage industry’. Parts of it still are, but there are plenty of retailers and suppliers who are efficient, progressive and profitable. What should everyone in our industry either stop or start doing? Start understanding that better customer service – be that retailer to customer or supplier to retailer – needs to improve further. Spare parts and replacements in particular take far too long for today’s consumer.
And stop wasting so many resources. The volume of products that arrive damaged and that suppliers do not want back is staggering!
Where do you see the industry going in the next 5-10 years? Online sales will continue to grow, which will marginalise those that don’t move with that trend. Consumers are becoming more conscious of the impact that ‘fast furniture’ (sorry, terrible pun!) has, and I expect replacement cycles to lengthen.
What question do you wish we’d asked? How would you have answered? Do you think a digital sales tax is a good idea? Yes, in principle, because it is much harder to avoid than standard methods of taxing corporate activity. There has to be a levelling up between bricks-and-mortar operators and those that sell predominantly online, simply because of the vastly different cost bases. If the pandemic taught us anything, it must be that without support, high streets and other physical retail will continue to decline
