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Retailer Face To Face: Card Factory
Keep Calm And
Karen On Karen Hubbard, now over a year into her role as ceo of Card Factory, has done a lot of looking, listening and asking. Now, having completed an extensive strategic review and having immersed herself in the findings of a major research project that delved deep into the UK card buyers’ psyche, you get a feeling she is ready for a bit of action. PG ventured into the headquarters of what is now not only the UK’s largest specialist greeting card retailer, but also arguably the nation’s biggest card publisher too, to meet ‘the mummy’ of the business. Card Factory fared well in the recent Which? League table, which ranked the UK’s favourite 100 shops. It came in 9th as the store that the 10,000+ consumers who participated in the research company’s survey, when asked about overall experience and whether they would recommend the store. It was a long way up from Clintons (who ranked 88th) and even Paperchase (which came in at 32nd place). Karen Hubbard, ceo of Card Factory has a cupboard-full of recent reassuring research findings, but will welcome the endorsement from Which?, recognising it will have a smidgeon of sway with the City analysts who are ever keen to knock-down the share price of companies that operate in what they may class as ephemeral sectors. They invariably struggle with retailing, let alone greeting cards! As the UK’s only specialist greeting card retailer plc, the industry needs Card Factory to turn in decent results, and Karen Hubbard in her first year in the hot seat did not come in for any criticism. The results reported a 4.3% increase in group turnover (to £398.2 m), its like-for-like sales were only a nudge up (0.4%), but it got away 40
PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
with it as other indicators looked OK - and the encouraging noises about the future were accepted. Ever since it started (under the stewardship of Dean and Janet Hoyle) Card Factory has been a disruptor and no mistake, but one whose tenacity and continued beating of its own drum has, over time, seen even the toughest of its early critics accept its place in the greeting card landscape. While there are many indies who have seen their sales go into a downward spiral upon the arrival of a Card Factory store in their vicinity, there are many others who have girded their loins, and created a differential enabling them to
Above: Karen Hubbard, ceo of Card Factory has now completed a detailed strategic review of the business and remains steadfast about the growth potential of the business and the future of greeting cards. Left: Card Factory’s Trafford Centre store is where the retailer has been trying out new fixtures and ideas. Below left: The move into more contemporary trends has fared well in store and in PR.
co-exist with the value giant. Timothy Melgund, ceo of Paperchase, whose own card and stationery chain has prospered in tandem with Card Factory’s exponential growth, openly airs the view that Card Factory has in many ways safeguarded the card sending tradition in the UK in that it has ensured a high presence of low cost greeting cards. As someone with who sees merit in positive PR (as oppose to her predecessor Richard Hayes who actively avoided a public profile at all costs), Karen Hubbard is of the predisposition to amplify Timothy’s views. As she points out, irrespective of where you sit in the sector, the UK greeting card industry has “a resilience and robustness”. And it is this that gives her the reassurance to make the most of her commanding position of the retailer who now accounts for a third of all greeting cards bought in the UK (32.6%) and 17.5% of the money spent on them. Talking candidly to PG about the business for the first time since she took over as ceo, Karen said that in order to create her vision for the group she first needed to “understand the market and the card buying consumer”, which in turn would enable her to form of a view of where Card Factory would be five years hence.