4 minute read
Retail Advice
Christmas by the sea
Henri Davis’ hopes for a ‘normal’ Christmas after Covid were dashed thanks to the postal strikes - and she noticed this in her card and calendar sales…
This is my third Christmas in Coverack, a small Cornish fishing village on the Lizard. I had expected it to be the first ‘normal’ one without a Covid influence, and in the main I think it was ‘more normal’ than recently in that we all had many more options about where we could spend our holiday break; what I hadn’t anticipated was the cost-of-living crisis and the postal strikes.
We are primarily a food shop but all the gift shops in the village are closed over the winter so we step in and offer a small range of Christmas cards and gifts for our local shoppers and visitors. This year we had two ranges of Christmas cards - Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) packs of charity cards and packs of cards, wrap and calendars from The Heart of the Garden, our Cornwall based card supplier.
Being a fishing community, the RNLI are close to all of our hearts and we rely on them to keep us and our visitors safe.
Our Christmas card customers can be divided into three distinct groups this year. Those who bought and sent early, who were probably unaffected by the strikes; those who left sending until later and may have posted first-class to try to get their cards to their destination in time, and those who ended up not bothering because of the strikes.
The RNLI cards are hugely popular here and always get off to a strong start, with customers seeking them out and travelling from other villages to make sure they can get what they want. The sales of these cards were good during November and we were optimistic that it was going to be a strong Christmas card year for us. We were not selling many stamps at that point so these cards were not necessarily being written straight away.
With the Heart of the Garden range I am always really careful to select the designs I believe will sell well and at the right price points so our percentage sell-through is high, and for the past two years we have only had a few packs left after Christmas, which is always good. The initial reaction to the designs we had was pleasing and I was confident I had chosen another good cross-section of images so we should do well again, fingers crossed.
Chatting to customers, I found a lot of our card senders use Christmas as a way of keeping in touch, putting a brief note in each card with news relevant to the recipient. We only have a mobile post office in the village two afternoons a week so we know that these are usually sent second class because we sell loads of stamps with our cards; this was even more noticeable given people’s restricted budgets.
This year, the phased announcement of postal strikes definitely had an impact on our sales, the first announcements brought forward people’s buying and posting timings as they began to realise that the last posting dates they would normally be guided by were unlikely to be relevant. As we got into December and we were told about the series of strikes to follow later in the month, customers just stopped buying stamps and only bought cards for those they were going to hand deliver.
Not only that but my customers who normally buy a calendar of Cornish images to send as a gift to a friend elsewhere just didn’t this year.
As I write this on January 3 I have just received a Whatsapp message from someone whose card I posted first class on December 12… I’m sure there will be many cards still arriving throughout January.
Henri Davis is an independent retail advisor to businesses in the cards, gifts, stationery and heritage industries with more than 35 years of retail experience. She worked for Habitat, Next, WHSmith and the National Trust and now advises retailers, visitor attractions, manufacturers and suppliers. A past chairman of the Giftware Association, during lockdown she has taken over a village stores and moved to Cornwall. For more information visit www.henridavis.co.uk
RNLI
The Heart of the Garden
