Even though I find myself in the early stages of my professional career, it struck me recently that I have been working for a while now. I’ve been employed more or less constantly since I was 14, starting with a job at a local pet kennel cleaning up after dogs and cats while their owners were away. Between then and entering the professional word I held several retail jobs, and the more experience I gain the more perspective I enjoy on these prior endeavors.
Recently, I have been involved in work that has me asking people “what would your customers say?” Oddly, as I reflect on the responses I’ve heard, I am reminded of my time in one long-standing (relative to teenage occupations) position with a local chain retailer. While I won’t name names here, I believe it will suffice to say that if you happened into a mall in the Baltimore/DC area in the mid-80s through early 2000s you were likely to pass this shop that specialized in collectables and professional grade knives. As a kid I was extremely into classical Japanese martial arts, so edged items (knives and swords) were of particular interest to me at the time. I turned years of perusing similar shops into a warehouse and retail job when I was old enough. While this proved an outstanding job through the end of high school into part of college, ultimately I was there to witness the company’s closure.
So, what does this have to do with what your customers say about you? Everything! Naive as I was at the time, I did not grasp the deep implications of things I heard on a near-daily basis: “I’m just looking,” “can you help me figure out XYZ,” and, most tellingly, “the prices here are ridiculous compared to the internet!” At the time (early 2000s) the internet was becoming more widely adopted for both entertainment and economic ends. People were starting to cross-shop the web for things they might otherwise have not considered buying online.
Let me lay out an example: a quality blade of respectable make might run you somewhere between $75-100 online (and to my fellow purists out there: yes, this is an entry level price point to pick in this market). In our brick and mortar store the same knife might run as high as $125, a 25 percent increase (notably, we usually charged MSRP or lower; the net charged far below suggested retail).
So, as one might expect, many people began to use us for “feel” shopping—putting their hands on it before ordering online. At worst, they stopped coming out altogether. This lead to a slide in the core business that this company had built itself.
Yet, it was not the only revenue stream. While I watched sales fall for edged items, I saw an unexpected boom in the collectable market. There was one line in particular that did exceptionally well. These figurines were popular collectors’ items in their market, and I regularly watched people come in to buy these statues that went from $200 well into the thousands of dollars each. I have to imagine that they were at least modestly profitable.
There were also other niche items that the company had cornered. A prime example was the classic American lighter (you know which one!) we were an officially recommended dealer, often offering marked-up specialty products at list cost.
I think this is a good moment to pause and clarify one thing: I am not about to suggest that I have advice that might have saved this company, or that anything could have overcome the circumstances we found ourselves in. I am not looking to claim that they flew headlong into an obvious mountain; this was a nuanced and complicated situation which I do not have all the facts for.
Yet, as a member of the front-line staff, I don’t know that we ever truly considered what our customers wanted. Towards the end I, as an employee, felt some brand tension as we attempted to pivot from our core business to other, potentially life-saving lines of business. As we did so, I heard even more from our customers: “are you not selling knives anymore?” “what is all of this stuff doing in here?”, and “what happened to the store I used to know?” In retrospect it is clear that this inflection point was not truly informed by our customers. Instead of finding out what they truly valued, and giving that to them, we relied on trying to fire up a new model without putting the old one to rest. In the end, the stores closed and the reverberations were felt across both the family that had been built at the company, and our long-term customers.
The lesson I am still learning from this is to question what you are delivering. Often, we get into a business we love and try to help others who love the same things. Sometimes those loves seem to wander, or another way to fulfill them appears. When that happens, you have to ask yourself: do I really know what my customers want, and do I know how to deliver value to them? If not, you might not be able to keep up and stay profitable despite your best intentions.
Alec Kisiel is the Director of Client Engagement for entreQuest. He helps to assess organizational dynamics, project manage client deliverables, and engage leaders at every level of an organization.
