Business success takes time, footfall and a slice of luck - Kevin Buckle
I’m often asked if the footfall in the Waverley Market is as good as it seems. The answer is yes but it has to be the kind of footfall that suits whatever business the person asking the question has.
I’ve sometimes had complaints from pop-ups opposite the old shop who feel they have been misled about how their business will fare without realising they are missing the point.
First, as any established business will tell you, your customer base needs to be built up over time, so simply thinking you can drop in to the centre for a few days at one of the busier times of the year is naive to start with.
Second, no matter how large the footfall you need to be selling something those people want. With seven and a half million people visiting the centre each year it is understandable that businesses think they only need a fraction of that footfall to be successful but they soon find out it doesn’t work like that.
When I moved in before the pandemic there was a reasonable amount of footfall that was just people going to work each day to and from the station.
If anything the footfall has improved, as while it has consistently stayed at the same level, many of those commuters have now been lost to working from home and the numbers have been made up by visitors who generally are better for the centre’s businesses.
With several new businesses joining the centre recently and with more to come, it will be interesting to see how they fare and whether they have done their homework or simply relied on the big footfall number.
One of the advantages of the centre to Avalanche when I was asked to join was that footfall. I had decided I did not want to compete with the scramble online to get customers to pre-order a new album, especially as more and more the labels and artists were offering better versions of an album than a shop was being given.
Quickly then shops started trying to gain an advantage over each other by securing “exclusives” and it was simply something I objected to in principle as I had no wish to take business away from my friends with other record shops in places like Cardiff and Leeds.
While Avalanche had an excellent customer base built up over the years that was being quickly eroded by the amount of D2C (Direct To Customer) sales taking place. I believed that strong footfall was the solution but was under no illusions as to how many of that footfall would be potential customers.
As I had hoped, our loyal customers were supportive and we benefitted from the fact we had always continued to sell vinyl long after many had given up, so were well placed when it showed a revival. We also responded to customer requests and stocked more T-shirts.
What has proved to be a complete bonus is that much of the footfall is families on holiday and they now head straight to a record shop like Avalanche which would not have been the case ten years ago.
I like to think that our recent success has been down to good planning with an extra slice of good luck!