Sharpening the Sword is a regular column by retailer John Riley of Grasshopper's comics, a 1300 foot comic and game store in
Free Comic Book Day 2006 was a very interesting event here at Grasshopper's. Despite our planning, the day of the event everything fell apart. Not a single seminar went off as planned, our discussion group met 'informally' two hours before they were supposed to, our comic professional backed out two days before, and our character appearance just didn't show at all. And of course a few hundred kids in our town received their first Communion that day which really didn't help attendance.
I honestly felt we had promoted this year's event better than ever. We had promotions running with all our local libraries. We had a promotion with our local 'mega-plex cinema', we had the endorsement of much of the town, and had done a lot of in-store promotion. But our attendance of about 300 was a small fraction of our expected turnout based on years past.
And yet the day was a remarkable success! How can that be? Because I think fundamentally we've changed the way people shop in our store.
These past few months I've been writing about Business Planning and Learning from the Mass Market which is what we've been working on here in our store. FCBD 2006 was our own personal deadline to make some important changes to the front of our store. As I said a few articles ago, I think that your storefront and the first few feet of your store serve as the first communication between your business and the general public. We figured FCBD would be both a great acid test to see if these changes had an impact and also a great opportunity to maximize that impact if it existed.
Our biggest change was to totally renovate the storefront and eliminate the front window display area. We ripped it out, allowing people passing by to look right into the store. For the past thirteen years we had a window display area which was three feet deep and about four feet tall, which allowed us to put in a nice display and still have people look over it into the store itself. Right in the new window area (which has no posters!) we put in a few nice demo tables painted in bright primary colors with childrens' games on them. Surrounding the demo tables were other children's games and comics aimed at kids.
All we did was change the first three feet of our store. So what happened? People started asking us if we just opened!
Although we had a big sign on the front that said 'COMICS', the general public walking by saw the children's games in the window, and felt that there was indeed something in this store that was aimed at their family. They entered the store and instead of moving quickly through the first four feet of the store they gravitated toward the games to check them out. They all looked comfortable and excited to be there. In past years I've seen thousands of new customers on FCBDs come in and kind of wander through the store. Were they excited? Sure! Were they happy to be there? Definitely. But they didn't seem to know what to do other than kind of wander around and casually look at stuff.
By changing the front to be very mass market and familiar we made it so that customers instinctively 'knew' how to shop in our store. Is this all in my head? Well, while our attendance was way below expectations, our sales were 50% above our projections. For the first time it looked like the general public was actually 'shopping'.
So how does this apply to the 80/20 rule that I've mentioned at the end of my last few columns? Well the 80/20 rule basically says that 20% of anything generates 80% of the results. So 20% of the products in your store generate 80% of your sales. 20% of your customers probably generate 80% of your revenue. As an industry we generate 100% of our sales from probably about .0001% of the population. But if our store window areas are focused on that .0001% of the population, then we're not targeting...well, almost everybody!
One of the comments that really struck me was from a woman who regularly brings her children to the store. When she saw the new storefront she was very excited and told us that she thought the store was 'much less intimidating.' I was stunned. 'Intimidating?' I always thought of our store as open, friendly, and very well lit, far from intimidating. But that wasn't the perception of the general public.
Most martial artists will tell you that the scariest day in your martial arts career is the day you first walk through the door into the dojo. It's intimidating. You don't know what to expect. It's an entirely different world. And since many dojos' training areas are still hidden from the view of the front window, you don't really know what to expect until you're already inside. It's definitely intimidating.
Well apparently that's the way the general public views our stores. It's a different world that they usually can't even get a glimpse into from the outside. By changing our storefront to something that the general public was not only interested in but also felt familiar with we literally changed their comfort level with the entire store.