nursery matters JOHN BARKER
Barking Mad With independent retailers being able to re-open this month, Pramland’s John Barker is feeling both apprehensive and optimistic. Here he shares his thoughts.
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his month Pramland’s John Barker is talking car seats. Here he gives his view of how, by fine tuning your ranges and demonstrating your knowledge, you can secure customer confidence and ultimately the ringing of the till! After the madness of April it would appear May was a little bit of a let-down for many of us. Having spoken to a number of people, both stores and brands showed that May was much quieter than the previous month. Although footfall and sales remained good across many of our stores customers didn’t appear to want to part with their cash as readily as the month before. We noticed a significant swing away from urgent, must have it now, here’s the cash type shopping to I’m due in 3 or 4 months so here’s the minimum deposit. At the end of the day normality had to resume but I had assumed, like the first lockdown it wouldn’t have been as soon. After the first lockdown we found that we remained exceptionally busy for a good 8 to 10 weeks. Maybe due to the open ended nature of the recent lockdown people decided not to wait for stores to reopen? Oh well, business is still good so we can’t
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nursery today
grumble. It’s just funny how we get so greedy when times are really good. As this month’s issue is focussing on Car Seats I thought, unlike normal I would also focus on them too! There’s a first for everything I guess. Firstly I’d like to touch on the sale of seats and the difference between selling a box and advising a customer, and the rewards that will come as a result. We all love the idea of a customer coming in store knowing what they want. They ask if we have it, they ask what our price is and if we have it at the right price they buy it, simple. But is this best for our customer and most importantly for their little one? As the market becomes more and more swamped by brands launching an ever growing range of seats at prices that sometimes make you scratch your head at how we can all make a profit, the car seat market is becoming more complicated for us stores but easier for the customer. To your average customer iSize means safe and easy to fit, it also means I can buy that and it will
Image courtesy Maxi-Cosi
As the market becomes more and more swa mped by brands launchin g an ever growing range of seats at prices that sometimes make you scratch your head at how we can all make a pro fit, the car seat market is becomin g more complicated for us stores but easier for the customer
john@pramland.co.uk
