Discovering the power of Harry and One Direction - Kevin Buckle
Avalanche has always been a broad church stocking what our customers wanted, as well as the things we wanted to sell them, and it was this policy that led us to discover the power of One Direction.
When we first started in the Eighties we were very much an indie shop selling indie music to indie people. The first time we ever deviated from that was when customers would regularly ask for Metallica and we realised we needed to add thrash metal to our jangly guitar offering.
Now as it turned out Metallica were on an indie label – Music For Nations – at the time so it was easy for us to stock their records which we did with great success.
Little did we know that all these decades later a new generation would be looking to buy Metallica records because of the TV show Stranger Things, which of course also propelled Kate Bush back into the limelight.
Our dalliance with One Direction started off with us stocking just one mug. We were being regularly asked by parents looking to buy a present if we had anything by the band and young girls in their My Chemical Romance t-shirts looking to buy something for their big sister.
It was never clear whether these young girls were secret fans themselves or looking to embarrass their older sibling. Certainly after we stocked a One Direction mug it became a popular sale very quickly and we were soon regularly being asked if there was anything else we could get.
The answer to that question was that there certainly was a mountain of merchandise we could order from earrings and pendants to notebooks and stationery sets to badges, bags and bangles. In our first foray I decided against t-shirts – there were many designs but a limited choice of sizes. Customers just couldn’t get enough and eventually we started to stock the t-shirts as between all the designs we could cater for every size.
The latest artist we have started stocking due to public demand is MF Doom as yet again we move into another genre, this time Hip hop, an area we generally leave to our good friends Underground Solu’shn just along the road from us. Sales over the last couple of weeks have been very promising and we have now managed to source the full catalogue of what is available.
Certainly One Direction sales work on several levels with die hard fans often buying several items but also people buying out of nostalgia or even ironically.
Believe me if you want to feel old listen to older teenagers talking about when they were young and loved the band. Harry has now of course cleverly reinvented himself to appeal again to these older teenagers.
I have mentioned some of this before but with Harry in town it seemed a good time to remind folk that not only do we try to have something for everybody, but these days it is not unusual for somebody to buy a Metallica t-shirt and One Direction earrings!