The Resilient Retail Game Plan - retail insights, retail trends and best practices

With just under 100 days left until Christmas Day, I’ve got my festive fingers crossed that with a little help from The Resilient Retail Game plan you’re feeling well prepared for the busy Christmas sales season.  If you’ve got your stock levels sorted and your marketing scheduled now is the time now to look ahead for bottlenecks - to see if you can anticipate and pre-empt pinch points and tackle...

As we’ve covered over the last 10 or so episodes, there’s a lot to consider and arrange when it comes to getting ready for the festive season. From securing stock to marketing and delivery, there are so many moving parts to keep track of, and as the orders fly in and things get busier, it’s all too easy to lose focus, make mistakes and burn out.  Strategising week-by-week might be effective for th...

Whilst big retail isn’t exactly going anywhere, we’re seeing more and more that customers want something that mass-produced products and high street giants generally can’t offer - to be part of a journey when it comes to the consumer experience.  Whether it’s getting their hands on something handmade and unique or voting with their wallet by buying locally and sustainably, consumers are savvy and...

As we’ve covered in previous episodes, Christmas has all the potential to be the most profitable point of your financial year, but a lot of your sales success is dependent on how well prepared you are to meet the demands of your customers. From making sure you’ve secured enough of your bestsellers to avoiding creating a stockpile of those dreaded ‘brown bananas', forecasting your sales and orderin...

In my first solo episode in three and a half months and as a break from my Xmas content, I thought I’d spend this podcast sharing with you the five books that have made an impact on me and my business. You can always find me reading, I mostly have my head buried in novels, but when I started The Resilient Retail Club digging into business books keep me focused and helped me absorb info that has he...

Consumers, now more than ever, want to connect and relate to the brands and businesses that they buy from. It’s not enough to just send your products out into the world and expect them to fly off the shelves - you have to convey who you are and what you value if you want to stand out to your customers. Regardless of whether your product business was born from a simple hobby, has grown out of a sea...

Whether you’ve already established a crew of handy helpers or you’re looking to add your first extra pair of hands to the production line in time for your Xmas orders, recruiting is just the first step in putting a trustworthy team together. Setting expectations, engaging your workforce and ultimately managing your staff is a whole other ballgame with its own challenges and intricacies. In episode...

So, today's episode is a little different for two reasons.  Firstly, we experienced a little technical issue during this recording, consequently, there’s a shift in my audio quality from around 25 minutes into the episode - my apologies! But secondly, and more importantly, we’re taking a break from getting ready for Christmas to let off some steam. The life of a small business owner is generally a...

It may not be a workshop at the North Pole, but your small business is likely to be just as busy come Christmas time. By the same token, you may not have quite as many ‘customers’ as Santa Claus but you certainly might need a band of elves to ensure your orders are fulfilled, your products are produced and your deliveries are sent out on time. Taking on team members can feel like a big step for sm...

If the previous few episodes hadn’t made it abundantly clear, prepping and optimising your product business for Christmas is absolute vital if you want to make the most of the year’s peak purchasing season. Building genuinely engaged audiences and deploying successful marketing campaigns doesn’t happen overnight, you have to get a strategy in place and when it comes to the festive period, the earl...

You may remember that the power of PR played a large part in the results of my recent product business survey, and with Christmas, technically, on the way, getting into gift guides and being found in features could make a big difference to your sales come the festive season. Approaching press outlets, however, can be a bit intimidating, so, as part of this series of episodes focusing on getting se...

From the sounds of Slade and Band-Aid permeating the airwaves to the snowflake fringed points of sale at seemingly every checkout, for better or worse, Christmas seems to start earlier every year. On average, the buying public might resent the idea of turning their thoughts to the festive season as soon as the Hallowe’en decorations are down, but with one-third of all retail sales taken in the six...

This episode marks the one year anniversary of the launch of The Resilient Retail Game Plan podcast, and to all my guests and those that have tuned in over the last 47 episodes, I can’t thank you enough! I hope the podcast continues to entertain and educate you, and I look forward to sharing more of my product business knowledge with you in the episodes to come! In today's episode, I speak to Koma...

With ever-improving engagement platforms and tools giving business owners so many different ways to reach potential customers, it’s important to diversify your marketing channels in order to get your products in front of the right people.  Due to their cultural ubiquity, Facebook and Instagram might be some of the first platforms that come to mind when you’re thinking of where to advertise and eve...

Between securing product placements and getting featured in gift guides, guest blogging isn’t perhaps the first thing you’d think of when it comes to possible PR opportunities, but it can be a powerful way to connect with your ideal clients and gain exposure.  In today’s episode, I speak to PR specialist Colette Machado. From previously working as an online journalist for BBC News to helping entre...

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, in simple terms, is the process of improving the quality and quantity of traffic to your website, and with more small businesses adopting a digital-first business model than ever, creating the optimal conditions for being found organically through search results is incredibly important. Compared to the simple transactional nature of paid advertising, SEO can seem...

From marketplace apps like Depop to capitalist behemoths like Amazon, E-commerce comes in many shapes and forms but none often so critical as your own website. In this day and age, and especially in the aftermath of the Coronavirus pandemic, consumers expect your business, small or large, to have some form of online presence - fortunately, it’s easier than ever to set up a website. But how do you...

Email has become as ubiquitous a form of communicating with customers as any of the traditional marketing mediums, and in an increasingly digital world, emails couldn’t be more valuable in helping customers to make a decision on what and what not to buy. It’s a powerful tool and really makes money when it works, but despite many small business reporting having an email list, email marketing is sti...

From my long career in the retail sector to working one-to-one with large clients and hosting numerous courses I know first-hand how confusing and overwhelming running a business can be and decided last May that I wanted to create, and make available, helpful content around running creative product businesses. I quickly decided to start a membership program and the rest, as they say, is history! A...

Loyalty is absolutely key when it comes to selling creative products, but it’s something business owners often don’t prioritise. It’s easy to get distracted chasing new customers and with the prevalence of complicated legacy loyalty programs like Nectar and Tesco’s Clubcard, where consumers haven’t always seen the best return, it can be hard to know how best to entice, reward and retain your exist...

Way back in episode 28 of The Resilient Retail Game Plan I spoke about where to sell your creative products. Each of the better-known e-commerce platforms tend to have their own kind of community and fulfil a certain niche - but in today’s episode, I want to focus on the marketplace offering unique crafts, personalised products and DIY designs: Etsy. To help me better understand what makes Etsy so...

The product business survey I conducted this march turned up a lot of interesting information as well as a few surprises, and in episode 36 of The Resilient Retail Game Plan I did a countdown of one of the collections of results that I found most fascinating - the things that contributors said made the most difference to their businesses.  Answers ranged from establishing a stronger brand identity...

There's been a massive sea change in recent years when it comes to consumers and the relationships that they have, and maintain, with the people, companies and even industries that they buy from. We've seen this in the advent of conscious consumerism and through the more recent drive to support small businesses in the wake of COVID-19. Part of this shift in consumer mindset can be attributed to th...

From our favourite classic adverts to the advent of celebrity Youtubers, can you think of a more powerful, versatile, or memorable way to promote a brand, business or product than through video? With the incredible reach afforded by social media and the digital wonders that are smartphones, video has become an indispensable tool for any business. So, for my second-ever interview on The Resilient R...

After what seems like an eternity, lockdown has finally been lifted! Non-essential retail can now re-open, and I couldn’t be happier for all you creative product business owners out there - here’s to some healthy sales numbers and growing profits. I’m also very happy and excited to introduce my first ever guest on The Resilient Retail Game Plan, Katie Glickman!  Katie is the owner and creator of t...