England – Back to work?

 

English retailers are beginning preparation for a return to trading as shops across the country may slowly be able to open their doors from Monday 1st June. There are many challenges facing these retailers in the coming weeks, not least the task of rebuilding their customers’ confidence in bricks and mortar. The particular challenge facing lingerie and swimwear independent retailers is that the focus and point of difference is the fitting service that they offer. This presents a unique assessment of their business premises and customer relations: however their flexibility and resilience to change should stand them in good stead. And whilst online sales soared for some product groups in April and May, the clothing sector did not perform as well with monthly sales down nearly 24% in April and estimated at even a greater percentage for May. Shops that are involved in primarily bricks and mortar are now re-evaluating their approach to online and digital selling. The consumer has become more accustomed to virtual digital interactions over the last 9-10 weeks and more are becoming comfortable with technology.

Underlines spoke with 3 shop owners in different parts of the country: Carol’s Lingerie based in Bishops Stortford (owned by Carol Segal), Embrace Boutique in Worcester (owned by Paula Farrington and Lisa Farrington-Martin) and Sugar & Spice in the Isle of Wight (owned by Sheila Wilson). All three independent shops intend to open on 1st June (assuming government plans continue to allow non-essential retail to open) but they are fully aware of the pitfalls they may face on a number of levels. Despite the essential social distancing, none are going to enforce appointment only visits but rather limit the number of people allowed into their shops.

Carol Segal comments: “We will be opening with full staff and doing our usual 6-day week: we are a team and to keep up morale we work as a team. The first difficulty is who is going to want to shop? Then we have to be ready. My staff will be given different jobs to do in different parts of the shop to keep us safely separated. We will ask customers to wash hand and then present them with gloves and mask – we will also be gloved, visored and masked. As we have been in business a long time – 34 years – I will first just look at the customer and make decisions on what to give them to try on. We will stand 2 metres away and hand the bras to them over the wall of the changing room. We can only allow one customers in at a time and will limit them (if we are busy!) to 30-45 minutes – there can really be no browsing.”

Sheila Wilson intends to open for fewer days to begin with. “We will be opening at the beginning of June initially from Wednesday to Saturday, adding in more days if the demand is there. Of course there are lots of practical issues to overcome to enable distancing in a small shop and maintaining hygiene…a lot of our ladies are enquiring about fitting, after all that is our USP, and how we can achieve that whilst distancing! I am also in discussion with the local business association and town council regarding what needs to happen in the town, for example widening the pavements to enable distancing. It’s no good being safe in the shop if the customers don’t feel safe getting there! We will be offering and encouraging people to make appointments and they will be given priority but also happy to receive walk-ins if the space allows.”

Paula Farrington of Embrace Boutique has thought long and hard about reopening and comments: “We will open provided that the shopping centre where we are located opens and subject to our agonising about the whole situation! Firstly is it safe – no-one knows! Secondly is it financially wise? On the one hand people could be desperate to get out and shop but on the other if we get as little custom as we did in the weeks running up to lockdown it would probably be better to stay furloughed. Thirdly, there are multitude of practical difficulties, the shop is so small that to be able to maintain social distancing we will only be able to have one member of staff working and maximum two customers at any time, problems with touching stock, expense of erecting screens at the pay point, opening of fitting rooms, dealing with returns and of course contactless payments can only go up to £45. We are having sleepless nights about this with the major difficulty posed being fittings with social distancing.”

On one point all 3 shops are in full agreement – that although they would like to work to an appointments rota, this is not economically feasible. As Carol states frankly “we would like to work to appointments but we are desperate to start taking money so if we are empty and someone pops in, then yes, we are ready to serve.”

And what of changing room etiquette and stock rotation after consumers have tried products on? A particularly knotty problem for lingerie and swimwear stores and government guidelines seem vague and not related to their particular business. Paula comments: “The government has published guidelines for shops but there is nothing mandatory…it very much puts the onus on the shops to sort things out rather than lay down any common rules that MUST be enforced. This said, we will try to keep the number of items tried on to a minimum and will ‘quarantine’ all items from 48-72 hours before putting them back on the shelves.” Sheila questions timings: “Some questions still remain, like how long do items that have been tried on need to remain out of circulation? This is where I feel there is a lack of detail. My current thinking is to place everything tried on into an adjacent room then replace into store the following day. We will ask customers to use hand gel on entering, only touch what they need to and gel again before trying things on.”

Carol too has seen the HMRC guidelines but says that they are ready to roll up their sleeves to keep things as safe as possible: “We are ready to clean the counter, toilets, changing rooms and common areas after every single customers and we will shut 30 minutes early at the end of each evening to do a full clean of the premises.” On the problem of rotating stock Carol adds that this is the biggest headache: “We hold a massive stock but I cannot put a bra to the side for 5 days to wait for it to free of anything! If someone was buying online how do they know it hasn’t been sent out two or even three times and then on to them! I am just hoping that I can keep giving and suggesting different styles to different customers.”

All accept contactless payments already but the current limit is £45 – how does this impact their possible sales? Carol quips: “If we are lucky enough to have a customer who is spending more and needs to put in their pin number we will just clean it immediately afterwards!” Other routes are pre-ordering to collect in store where card payment can be made in advance or alternative methods such as PayPal.

So will the continuing aftermath of COVID-19 change their business model of bricks and mortar first and foremost? Paula says: “We already have a website but there is still an issue of cross-contamination by sending things out (and possibly returned) by mail.”

Carol says that she closed her online site 5 years ago but things will change: “If we decide to stay around we need to reinvest and have both the shop and online shop. But now we are not only up against other established online sites that discount regular stock but we are also in competition with manufacturers. This is a really significant time for independent shops.” Sheila likewise has been turning her efforts towards more digital presence “whilst we have been closed, I have used the time to review the website, with changes planned, redesigning our Mailchimp template and establishing a selling group on Facebook. They have been really successful and welcomed. Whilst we are predominantly bricks and mortar store and will remain so, lockdown is training people to shop online so I feel this cannot be ignored!”

So it is apparent that these well-established stores are tuned into changes in customer behaviour and based on their size have a great opportunity to be more flexible and elevate their appeal to consumers who have become accustomed to shopping locally (primarily for essential goods but more likely for discretional purchases in the future). The demise of some of the major department store chains or scaling back of their operations can only mean opportunities for the well-appointed and well-stocked independent store that can offer digital ordering too. There are bound to be winners and losers but for those indies that can survive 2020, there will be a chance to prosper in 2021 and beyond.

 In our next feature we will talk to stores that do not intend to open on 1st June.