Retail Profile
Light at the end of the tunnel? John Baulch spoke to Gary Grant, founder and chairman of The Entertainer about what Gary describes as his “biggest challenge ever” and how he and his team have been forced to rethink the company’s entire business model as we move into the next phase of retail during the Covid-19 pandemic.
leaving retailers faced with a prolonged period of closure. For a retailer like The Entertainer, it was a daunting prospect, as Gary explained: “I’ve been on an emotional rollercoaster. It’s a frightening position to be in for a retailer, facing an undefined period of closure. The Entertainer is a bricks and mortar retailer which sells online: the internet supports our shops and vice versa - each channel generates sales for the other. But as a retailer which generates most of its turnover in-store and relies on delivering an experience to customers, when you close that side of the business, you’re looking at a very deep hole with no light at the end of the tunnel.” Faced with the biggest challenge The Entertainer had ever been presented with, this was the time to be brave and take bold decisions: “The team I have around me has been quite remarkable,” admitted Gary, “ led by my son Duncan and our CEO Mark Campbell, we have completely realigned the business. It has been amazing to see Duncan’s approach to a problem - how he put new processes in place and pulled everything together in such a short space of time. We came up with a new plan which meant completely re-budgeting and reviewing all inflowing stock: did we need what we had on order? What would we do about FOB commitments? In rebuilding our business model, we had to make some difficult decisions; we went through all of our business expenses quite ruthlessly and removed any which weren’t deemed essential.”
Gary Grant
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was originally due to interview Gary Grant on 18th March, ahead of the grand opening of the newly refurbished Birmingham Bull Ring store on 1st April. The original plan was for Gary to outline the new features of the store, which was to include the first ELC ‘store within a store’ concept, for an article which was scheduled to appear in the April issue of Toy World. In the light of the rapidly escalating pandemic situation, plans changed; by the time Gary called at 8.00 pm that evening, he suggested that now wasn’t the right time to be running an article extolling the virtues of a new store layout, and I agreed
with him completely. So we just chatted for 45 minutes – all completely off the record - about the impending crisis: what we thought might happen, how it would affect not only our respective businesses, but the whole of the UK, and how we might navigate the choppy waters which lay ahead. By the time I caught up with Gary to conduct this official on the record interview six weeks later, the whole world had changed. Much of what we had discussed during that initial conversation had come to pass: as we both thought, non-food stores had been instructed to close by the government,
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This reappraisal of everything the chain had been doing up to that point saw The Entertainer do something it had never previously done in its history: it launched a BOGOF sale in stores. The sale started on 17th March, at which point no-one knew for certain how much longer stores would be able to remain open. In the end, the sale ran for six days before lockdown officially started: “It was purely a cash-raising exercise” admits Gary, “to tide us over the undefined period of closure. We lost money that week, but the one thing I remember from the financial crisis of 2008 is that ‘cash is king’. When you have cash, you can make your own decisions. When you haven’t, you need to go begging. In the end, we raised a substantial sum of money which enabled us to pay our staff in full for the whole of April and May.” Thankfully, additional help was at hand, with the government stepping in to support businesses through a range of initiatives, which Gary admits were