retail BABYGEAR
Geared up!
Having been trading for in excess of 40 years Nursery Today had the pleasure to catch up with Babygear’s owner Derwent Walsh to find out more about this established independent nursery retailer located in Dorset.
Can you tell our readers a little about Babygear, what was the inspiration behind opening your doors? Our start-up was actually The Baby Studio in Oxfordshire. After about four years we realised we needed a much bigger store and a lot more brands, so we began looking for an acquisition. In June 2016 we acquired Babygear in Dorset. Babygear was a well-established store serving a wide area of the South West and is now in its 42nd year.
You are based in Bridport, Dorset. Was there a specific rationale behind this location? At the time there was also a store for sale in the North, but the long history of Babygear and the attraction of moving home to Dorset by the sea led us South.
Since opening what has been your largest challenge and also what has been your biggest success to date? Apart from a burglary, where we had to fight the insurers for over six months to get compensated and having to close for COVID, our main challenges are from the internet, baby shows and Black Friday. For online it is not so much the online giants themselves, but actually the consumer’s perception of price. Many people incorrectly think that the lowest price is only going to be available online, so many don’t even bother going to a store. Almost all of the time we offer lower prices than online and just like all the other great independents, we provide a great in-store experience for our customers, but some customers just don’t shop in stores, so miss out on expert advice, better prices and service. Baby shows cause a lull in sales because people 12
are put off buying in store until they have been to the show. Mostly we compete, but there is still a small percentage that buy at the show, so another slice of our traditional sales gone. Black Friday tends to kill the market for us during the weeks before. Then when the customers realise that there are no offers on the popular items they come back to the store. I guess our biggest success has been transforming the store and its operating systems. In its previous form I don’t think it would have survived in this world of lower margins, intense marketing and social media demands and customers armed with live price data on their phone.
As an established independent retailer, how important are brand names to the business? The brands we represent are critical to our business. We stock a wide selection of the most trusted brands. We don’t try to stock every brand; we prefer to research a selection of best solutions to our customer needs and try not to have so many it overwhelms them.
You stock a multitude of leading nursery brands across a variety of categories – do you offer the same products in-store as you do online? We mainly focus on the store and have a smaller selection of products online. There are a few items online that we don’t have in store, but these are mainly items that will ship direct from the Brand.
You offer a price match service, how does this work for the business? Do you find it difficult for the business when customers come in-store armed with information found online on
products that might have been heavily discounted elsewhere? With internet prices being national it has certainly made trading more difficult, especially if you have a product that has been selling well in your area with no need to discount, where in another region they struggle to move it. They then discount it leading to everywhere needing to discount it. Thankfully we don’t get asked to price-match very often, probably because we are almost always at a good price. We know from feedback that we offer a good in-store experience, so maybe the few customers that don’t come back to us, wouldn’t have felt good about asking for a lower price. Usually when we do get asked to price match, it is on budget travel systems that the bigger brands clear out through the giant online retailers, so very often it is not worth matching. Over the years we have been forced to drop or remove from display many of the budget systems, where the value and price is not respected online. Otherwise, you end up spending an hour or two doing demos with no hope of ever getting the sale. Of course, this means that eventually there is nowhere for customers to see these products and then their sales fall off a cliff.
How do you keep up with current consumer trends and new products that enter the nursery arena? Mostly from Nursery Today! We always look forward to the next edition. We mainly deal with big brands and they are pretty good at keeping us updated and trained on new arrivals. One area where it is harder to keep ahead of trends is for the non-wheeled goods, such as carriers, muzzies, feeding and what I refer to as “soft stuff ”. It
nursery today
Retail Int BabyGear.indd 1
12/03/2024 16:12