interview BABYSTYLE
Support with style This month Nursery Today’s Editor, Penny Franks, had the pleasure to question BabyStyle’s Managing Director Andy Crane to find out more about the company, their principles and the support they give to independent retailers. BabyStyle is a strong supporter of the independent retailer, why do you value indies so highly?
Independent retailers are both the backbone and the life blood of this industry and such a valuable source of advice for forthcoming and existing parents in towns and cities all over the UK and Ireland. Each indie is somebody’s local store and they serve their postcodes with a personal service that no national retailer can compete with.
Andy Crane
What do you do that makes your brand stand out from your competitors?
We offer something for everyone, at every price point, without any compromise and this gives us real appeal to the savvy consumer with our Oyster or Hybrid collection. The egg range turns heads with its iconic British design and offers an accessible luxury experience that is refreshingly easy to use.
The Oyster3 has proven a popular product and BabyStyle has continued to innovate with the introduction of the Noir last year – what was the decision behind launching the Oyster3 Noir?
As mentioned above, we value the independent retailers and we wanted to give them a range-topping version of our most popular product that they could have all to themselves to help give them a genuine advantage at a local level.
How has this been received as an independent only exclusive?
Through recent conversations we have learned that those independents that are showing it off on their shop floor are selling it through very well. Those that don’t have it on display or who haven’t given it any sort of promotion or push aren’t, so there’s a surprise! We have advertised heavily in Nursery Today, sent out email newsletters to independents, have account managers regularly visit stores and shown it at trade shows and roadshows so the fact that it exists should be obvious but strangely we still get some independents who say they don’t know anything about it!
Do you offer any other exclusives to independents?
Yes, we offer exclusives from our egg collection and the Hybrid stroller is also exclusive to independents.
An area that concerns many bricks and mortar nursery retailers is competitors online pricing - do you feel this creates an uneven playing field and how do you monitor this?
We monitor prices through a software solution and we always hope that retailers will respect the brand values that are built into our products. There is a lot of discounting online, which certainly provides an immediate advantage over stores that still don’t sell over the internet and can lead to them having to price match against something that is shown to them on a smartphone. That isn’t fair when a store has worked hard to demonstrate a product and then they are faced with losing a sale to someone who has done nothing at all to stimulate interest in the product or spent any physical time with a consumer. Quite often though stores that play the price-cut game too hard seem to ultimately disappear so maybe there are some lessons to be learnt there?
Do you feel that some online only retailers de-value brands by way of 34
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06/02/2020 16:35