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

As the days of summer sun start to shorten and we start to pack up our parasols and barbecues, it’s time, of course, to turn our thoughts to Christmas. The festive season is of colossal importance to almost every business’s sales calendar, but with a seemingly endless torrent of global uncertainties, economic unbalance and rising costs across the board, it’s become increasingly difficult to foreca...

Everyone has that one story (well, one at the very least) of a time that their customer experience with a business fell short of their reasonable expectations and landed somewhere between being mildly disappointing and exceptionally infuriating.  Mistakes, breaks and being late are facts of life, but sometimes businesses drop the ball and the whole retail relationship turns sour pretty quickly. As...

Between the legacy of the Coronavirus pandemic, ballooning energy costs, rising levels of inflation and strikes left, right and centre, I think it’s safe to assume that some of you might be feeling a bit drained, exhausted even.  Maybe you’ve had issues sourcing your products or materials, perhaps your online sales have dissipated dramatically post-lockdown, or maybe everyone around you seems to b...

E-commerce can be very demanding. It takes enough energy and focus to create, source, produce and manufacture wonderful products - finding the consistent motivation, correct strategy and optimal platform on which to then sell can feel like an exhausting and elusive endeavour at the best of times.  That's why in episode 107 of The Resilient Retail Game Plan, I speak to fashion brand consultant Eliz...

As the summer sun continues to beat down harder than ever, for some of you, it might seem like your sales have dried up along with the nation's rivers, lakes and reservoirs, and whether you’ve been seeing steady growth throughout the year or not, it’s all too easy to let panic set in when you’re confronted with a sudden drop in sales. But fear not! In today’s podcast, I’m here to remind you that,...

In today’s episode of The Resilient Retail Game Plan, I speak to Emily Canino, founder of Doodlemoo, a UK-based independent lifestyle brand offering art prints, homewares, stationery, jewellery and gifts.  Doodlemoo has been featured in numerous magazines and has also found fame on the small screen, having been included on programmes such as ‘The Circle’ and ‘Tattoo Fixers’, but, as you can imagin...

With the immense number of businesses out there and the sheer amount of products available the world over, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everything and everyone is catered for, but you need only go as far as your local supermarket to discover that from fashion to tech, cosmetics to stationery and everything in between, that there are plenty of instances of design biases and blindspots when i...

One of the consistent trends I’ve noticed throughout the many conversations I’ve had with small business owners is that a great number of their journeys into the product business world marked the end of an often well-established and successful career - sometimes completely unrelated to their current independent endeavours. My guest today is no exception. Gayle Mansfield could have gone back to her...

Whether it’s businesses reappraising their supply chains or ditching plastic, HR departments extending their range of opportunities for more inclusive leave, or customers shopping more consciously, we’ve seen a real shift in recent years regarding attitudes towards environmental, human and social impact.  But for every brand with a genuine desire to use business as a force for good, there’s a larg...

We’re not quite post-pandemic yet, but the shops are open, trade shows are back and retail, for the most part, has got back into the swing of things.  This doesn’t mean however that anyone’s seeing anything approaching ’normal’ when it comes to sales. With the shift from shopping online in lockdown to the current desire for consumers to hit the high street, many businesses have seen their sales pl...

After almost exactly two years since it started and with over 53,000 downloads at the time of recording, I’m incredibly pleased to say that we’ve reached episode 100 of The Resilient Retail Game Plan. It’s been my pleasure and privilege to have had so many amazing guests join me on the podcast, and I’m deeply grateful for the time and expertise they’ve all shared, but this wouldn’t happen without...

As the fourth largest social media platform in the world, Instagram has undoubtedly become ubiquitous with the way we connect, interact and for us as product business owners, how we market and even sell our goods.  In my conversations with other founders and throughout the course of my consulting, the subject of ‘the ‘gram’ comes up with great regularity - there are plenty of success stories to sh...

In episode 98 of The Resilient Retail Game Plan, I speak to Vicky Simmons, founder of the brutally honest, sarcastic greeting cards company, Mean Mail.  Inspired by the way friends talk to each other and Oscar Wilde’s famous quote “True friends stab you in the front”, Vicky’s designs are available in over 100 stockists internationally and have been commissioned by some of the world’s biggest brand...

From content recommendations tailored to viewing habits, to refilling prescriptions via a smartphone, the growing convergence of tech and personalisation continues to provide consumers with more and more specific options in an ever-increasingly efficient package.  We’re used to Amazon suggesting additional purchases based on our previous orders and are likely all familiar with being offered someth...

In episode 96 of The Resilient Retail Game Plan, I speak to the founder and CEO of Grind Coffee, David Abrahamovitch. Since starting with their first high-street space in Shoreditch back in 2011, Grind has expanded across the capital and into the homes of coffee lovers everywhere, with their amazing home compostable coffee pods and subscription service.  After nearly a decade of hard work building...

Whether it’s via 1-2-1 calls or strategy meetings, through my mentoring sessions or community chat, or in-person and at live events, as you’d expect, I speak to many, many product business owners on a daily basis.  And when you literally ‘talk shop’ day-to-day, as I do, you begin to not only start seeing patterns in the way that businesses operate and the ways in which the industry works, but you...

When everything’s going well and your top-line sales are growing, it can be easy to forget to keep an eye on your actual profitability. I hardly need to remind you that the last few years have been, in a word - turbulent, and the current economic climate is by no means balmy and pleasant, with rising costs and low customer confidence abound. Despite all this instability, some businesses have seen...

When it comes down to it there are just four core ways to increase your sales - to get more people to buy your products, to get those people to buy more from you, to have those customers spend more with you than they will have done previously, and finally, to get those customers to come back and buy more often.  But as we all know, making any one of these things happen, let alone consistently, is...

Websites have come a long way from the bare-bones HTML pages of the early 90s to the slick world-wide-web we inhabit today. Affordable DIY platforms, ranging from the drop-and-drag simplicity of Squarespace to the well-built infrastructure of Shopify have allowed small business owners to access the tools of the trade that were typically the reserve of big brands and flourish.  Whether you’re runni...

You need only take a quick scan of the apps on your smartphone to see how dramatically the landscape of social media has changed since Facebook got the ball rolling in earnest all those years ago. Social media has not only been at the forefront of adopting and trialling new tech but in many cases platforms like Instagram and TikTok have been the change-makers themselves, tweaking their platforms,...

When it comes to the world of e-commerce, the name Etsy has become pretty much synonymous with small businesses, especially in terms of hand-made products and independently-crafted gifts. Since its foundation in 2005, the platform has changed a great deal on its own terms but has also kept pace with the shifting landscape of the internet, the rise (and dominance) of social media, and the general a...

Throughout the course of this podcast, as part of my many presentations and in discussions with numerous clients, I’ve talked a lot about the importance of multiple income streams. In a world that’s constantly changing and with ever-evolving technology that repeatedly lowers the barriers to entry in regards to reaching your current and future customers, it’s vital that we all keep on trying out di...

The shift we've seen in recent years in regards to conscious consumerism and sustainability is encouraging - even some of the largest and historically wasteful retailers are coming to understand that if they want to survive into the future that they need to take a good, hard look at the way they operate and how they relate to their customer base.  The ecological issues confronting us can seem insu...

It’s been a strange few years and it doesn’t seem like we can expect an end to the unexpected any time soon. Off the back of a pandemic, we’re now experiencing a rise in the cost of living, climbing inflation and even further instability created by ongoing geopolitical events. It’s no surprise that all this is affecting consumers and retailers alike, and when things get tough and your sales slow d...

As digital and social platforms have continually matured and as our use and dependence on them has grown, we’ve seen incredible advances made in the democratisation of retail.  Through ever-evolving interactions of apps and the wide accessibility of online tools, we’re now at a point where commerce and content are becoming one - where creators are able to operate beyond continental boundaries, att...