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Retailer Face To Face
Branching Out Mark Janson-Smith’s wife and business partner, Leona, describes her husband as the “Willy Wonka of the card world”.And, as soon as you enter the couple’s fourth shop, which opened in Greenwich, London, last month, you get her drift. It’s a wonderland where giant rulers are used as shelf spacers, an enormous tree is festooned with plush creatures, pens are displayed on a ‘candy floss cart’; it’s a place where you can adorn your post with an exclusive Greenwich Mean Time postmark and once a month cards are given away for free. PG caught up with a card retailing entrepreneur who has turned his ‘pure imagination’ into a reality.
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Inset: The Postmark store in Greenwich packs a punch in this historic London area due to its commanding corner position and retail execution. Above right: The already much talked about tree in the Greenwich store. Below right: (Right) Mark and Leona Janson-Smith with Mark’s father at the store’s opening party.
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PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
t a time when the trade is bemoaning the demise of independent stores in the UK (and especially in the heart of London), let alone the paucity of new stores opening up, along comes a fabulous exception Postmark Greenwich. This is the fourth store in the Londonbased Postmark group, and its largest by far, thereby providing plenty of room for the extra flourishes which set this independent card retail operator apart. While 70% bigger than its sibling stores (located in other London enclaves of Balham, Dulwich and Chiswick), the new store, in an impressive Victorian building on a corner unit, remains true to what the Janson-Smiths call the “Postmark brand” in that it is very much a greeting card and stationery store. The large collection of Jellycat plush is in fact the only range that is not either made of paper or related to paper products. As the ‘outsiders’, these furry additions make the most of their preferential status, hanging in and sitting around the
trunk of an enormous tree, which (though actually fake) appears to have grown up through the floorboards of the shop. As for the business ‘branching out’ to become what is now a ‘small multiple’, Mark says: “I always had plans to expand, and we have the systems and people in place now for that to happen, but I will never rush into things. They have to be right and at a justifiable rent”. He admits that having initially rejected the Greenwich site on cost grounds, having sat in a café across the road from the unit and counted not just the number of people walking past but also the type of people, that he then went back and made “a risky offer”, that was happily accepted. “As I watched the pedestrians I just kept saying to myself “she’d be a Postmark customer”, “he’d be a Postmark customer” or