The comeback kings

Store CV:

Name: Nash’s Premier, Jaywick, Clacton on Sea Retailers: Nash, Sharlie and Veer Patel Size: 1,500 sq ft Opening Hours: 6am-11pm Services: Fuel, Cash Machine, E-Top Up, National Lottery Staff: 12

TEAM WORK: Nash and Sharlie with their fantastic team.

Nash and Sharlie Patel had to make a difficult choice when they took on the family’s store but it was a choice wellworth making.

When Nash and Sharlie Patel fi rst took ownership of Nash’s family-owned convenience store back in 2016, they had one very big decision to make: stick or twist? In many ways, sticking with the old store and eventually selling up would have been the easy option. After all, the pair had already taken up successful careers in diff erent professions, trade at the store was slow and they had a young family to bring up. However, despite the signifi cant uphill challenge, the lure of taking on and transforming the 27-year-old store proved too strong for this ambitious pair to resist – and so twist they did.

Sharlie sets the scene: “When we fi rst took the site on we knew that we had a very clear choice – we had to either put everything into it or we had to walk away and lose it which would have been a real shame, especially for Nash, who had known it since he was a boy. Despite all the challenges, he could see the

potential that the site could offer.”

The potential he could see came in the form of a 1,500sq ft convenience store with a forecourt in Clacton-on-Sea – just a stone’s throw away from the beach and on the main B-road into and out of the town of Jaywick. The pair spent the next couple of years making various small investments in the business and building stocks back up, until in February 2018 they made the game-changing decision to join Premier.

“The team at Premier were amazing from the get-go,” Sharlie says. “They were so supportive, they gave us the facilities that we needed and crucially the Premier offer was the perfect fit for our audience. Value for money is so important to our shoppers and Premier really stands out here.”

Over the intervening years, Nash, Sharlie, and their son Veer, who joined the business in 2019, accrued a deep and meaningful understanding of what their shoppers truly wanted – building up even stronger local connections and bags of goodwill in the process.

“The business had been growing ever since we joined the Premier fascia and we knew that if we wanted to maintain that growth, we needed to make further big changes,” Sharlie says. “We wanted to offer our shoppers even more products and services and ultimately deliver an even better in-store experience for them.

“Shoppers want to come to a nice store, they want more products, they want better services and despite all the great progress we’d made up until that point, we knew that if we didn’t move with the times, we’d get left behind again.”

And so in February 2022, and with lockdown restrictions behind them, the family invested in a significant refit. The shop floor was extended to 1,500sq ft by converting space that had formally been occupied by a Post Office years before. “Our goal with the refit was to be the best that we could be for our shoppers,” Sharlie says. “We wanted to give them more variety, a far greater range of chilled products, and we wanted to shake things up with an amazing impulse and drinks to go offer.”

“The Premier team offered us incredible support throughout the process,” Sharlie adds. “The collaborative working was secondto none. The planning and merchandising teams in particular were fabulous, nothing was pushed on us, they took on board all of our local knowledge and we created the plan together. Our Premier RDM Tim Clements was also a fantastic support, He worked alongside of us for a whole week before the refurb began, helping us to move stock, dismantle fixtures and fittings and put them into storage.

“Another major benefit was the support that we received with staff training. Our staff spent a whole day refreshing their due diligence training with a wonderful man called Freddie Griffin from Booker’s Store Operations Advisor team prior to us re-opening. It was such a positive experience, the staff loved the process, I really think things like that make them feel valued as employees.”

And so, four weeks after it closed for

refurbishment, Nash’s Premier was re-born in early March 2022 – following a fullscale overhaul and the implementation of new cutting-edge features. “The extra space that we gained on the shop-floor enabled us to almost double our chilled food and soft drinks offer from nine metres to just over 16 metres,” Sharlie says. “We were able to increase our fruit and vegetables by a whole fridge and crucially to offer a much wider range of ready meals and Meal Deals which, thanks to the new Jack’s brand, are flying out.

“We’ve also doubled our frozen food offer. Frozen has really taken off since the start of this year and especially in recent months. It’s obviously cheaper for shoppers to buy, but its long shelf-life also means that frozen really appeals to shoppers who like to buy it when they can and save it up for the end of the week or month when cash is becoming tight. Shoppers round here don’t have a lot of money, they buy what they can afford from week to week and Premier’s £5 frozen meal deal is incredibly popular for that reason.

“Because of our busy seaside location, which attracts a vast amount of tourist trade in the summer months, we also wanted to extend our impulse and ‘to go’ offers, so that’s where the ‘Refresh’ concept came into play,” she adds. “We knew that we had a massive opportunity to drive footfall with Refresh and with the Tango Ice Blast offer in particular. Around here there is no-where else for shoppers to buy a Tango Ice Blast, unless they go to the cinema, and given our proximity to the beach and other green spaces we knew it would be a real hit.”

A hit, it certainly has been. On average the store’s Refresh zone takes around £500 a day with a huge 60 cups of Tango Ice Blast alone sold each day, rising to beyond 100 cups on hot weekends. The Refresh zone also includes Hershey’s Freeze and Reese’s hot chocolate, plus Jolly Rancher and Snow

Shock slush. Another key change has been the re-merchandising and re-positioning of the store’s vape range into a locked gantry on the shop floor. “I was a bit apprehensive at first but sales of vape products have tripled since they were moved onto the shop floor,” Sharlie says. “I would really recommend this change to other retailers. Having the display on the shop floor means that shoppers can browse the range so much better and properly take in the full range. Now, rather than just buying one Elf Bar disposable vape for example, they will buy three.”

Indeed, the store’s new vape offer has been such a success that the family are already planning to tweak it by replacing some of the slower selling e-liquid lines with ultrapopular disposables. Local cream cakes, merchandised in smart new refrigerated units have further enhanced the range, as has a new hot food to go offer from Delice De France.

The store’s existing American Confectionery offer was also doubled – a move which Sharlie says has also led to a doubling of sales. However, the store’s biggest change and point of difference is without a doubt its show-stopping 170 sq ft Beer Cave.

“We are beyond proud of our Beer Cave,” Sharlie says. Featuring bright neon lights and automatic doors, the fully insulated Beer Cave not only provides local shoppers with a uniquely-refreshing experience that is helping to drive footfall and sales. “Due to our seaside location and the many large events, such as air shows, commonly held around here, demand for multi-packs has always been high. However, the size of our

old store didn’t allow for us to sell them chilled. Thanks to the Beer Cave that’s all changed now though.

“It’s allowed us to expand our range hugely. We now have over 500 lines in the beer cave, including loads of multi-packs and more than 10 diff erent types of kegs, but we want to add even more. It’s all properly insulated so it’s a super-cool 6 degrees inside but it feels colder. It’s been such a hit with shoppers, especially on hot days! The Beer Cave also features two freezers for bags of ice and ice cream, but later on this year we actually plan to relocate them onto the shop fl oor to make space for even more chilled alcohol lines. There’s nothing else like this around here so the whole Beer Cave concept is really exciting for local shoppers. To any retailers thinking about investing in a Beer Cave, I say do it! It’s made such a phenomenal diff erence to us.” Spirits have also received some extra love in the form of a brand-new back-lit display behind the store’s busy till points.

“We opted for a very premium spirit display with enhanced lighting technology which really makes the products stand out. The whole spirits display is like a work of art now” Sharlie adds.

And the store refi t is not the only change made to the business in recent months. “We also launched a brand-new home-delivery service via Zeus Labs in July,” Sharlie says. “It’s still very early days and we’ve not yet done a big marketing push, but even so it’s already going down well with local people. We’re really confi dent that once we push it on Facebook and get the leafl ets out, home delivery will take off . We’ve even bought an e-scooter to help us carry out the deliveries and meet demand. It’s yet another change that we’ve made because we know our local shoppers and know this is something that many of them will appreciate.”

The appreciation that shoppers already have for the new-look store is already clear to see, with footfall and sales both having grown “signifi cantly” since the refi t ensued. “The change has been such a success that we’ve had to take on an extra seven members of staff to help us manage the new demand,” Sharlie says.

“Shoppers are in love with what we’ve done and even now, almost fi ve months on, they are still commenting on it and thanking us for the diff erence that it has made to them, which is so heart-warming to hear. Even now, I still stand back some days and think, ‘wow I can’t believe this is our store!’ It really is something to be proud of and to celebrate – and most exciting of all, we’re not done yet!”