Desert Island Stores: Indira Thambiah, non-executive director, Card Factory
In this latest instalment of our Desert Island Stores series, Glynn Davis chats to Indira Thambiah, non-executive director at Card Factory.
The store you remember from childhood?
I grew up in Sri Lanka, in Colombo, and it was a less prosperous place in those days. People made their own clothes, you went to a string of local shops for everyday items like rice and vegetables, and traders wheeled carts through the residential streets selling their wares from fish to milk and rather weirdly brooms. Retail as we know it didn’t exist. I do, however, remember the monthly trip to Ceylon Cold Stores. A drive from our house, stuck in traffic that consisted of both Porsches and bullock carts concurrently.
Hot and bothered despite air conditioning, we would arrive at the door and step into what felt like a refrigerated surgical ward. Everything was white – counter tops, uniforms, walls, floors, ceilings. Here you could buy butter, sausages, bacon, legs of lamb, gammon and everything meat and dairy – but none of it was on display. My mother would reel off her requirements from a list, succumb to a little upsell and cross-sell from the salesperson, double the order for sausages at my insistence and add on everything my brother had asked me to petition her for.
Subscribe to TRBAvailability appeared to have been memorised by the sales folk, since they knew what was and wasn’t in stock without lists or technology. We would then wait until everything was brought out from the refrigerated warehouse. It had a cursory inspection for picking errors rather than quality and would then be wrapped up in white paper for transport in the searing tropical sun, to disappear at lightning speed once we returned home to be rationed out over the following weekends as treats.
Most inspirational store to your career?
Argos – what’s not to love about a ‘laminated book of dreams’. I remember my surprise when I first saw the back of the showrooms – they were tiny, with shelves stacked to the ceiling. We only ever had two or three units of any SKU, and yet availability was in the high nineties. Despite the density of SKU’s, it only took minutes to find and pick an item. It was an incredibly slick back-end operation, one which I don’t see matched often even now. At the front-end that catalogue was meticulously produced to last six months in paper format – every detail checked, and the CEO went through the prices of the entire electronics section personally, line-by-line. You learned about attention to detail.
On some categories, margins were tighter than on milk. The innovation was constant, both in the stores, the call centres, and online. And most importantly, in the warehousing and logistics operation. We created many ‘firsts’ and ‘firsts at scale’. I think our proudest achievement was turning a quaint landline telephone reservation system called ring and reserve into the very first click & collect, which we all now take for granted as part of an everyday retail experience.
Most frequently used store?
Cooking is my passion so I’d have to say the London Farmers Markets. I am lucky enough to live a walk away from two of them; West Hampstead and Queens Park and it is the highlight of my week. Note to self to get a life. The produce is local and seasonal, and the prices are fair. The traders are fun and know their produce and they also know their regular customers. The growers and producers experiment as they know they have a willing and fearless clientele – so there is innovation and newness all the time.
It is a wonderful addition to any community and to be able to shop there every week for most of what I eat makes me very lucky. I also love The Source, which is all things grocery – rice, pulses etcetera – which you can buy in small quantities. There is no plastic, and you can take your own containers and it makes you really think about what you actually need to buy.
The store you wished you’d created?
Amazon. When I joined Argos to lead the digital team in 2002, Amazon was barely on my radar. It was still an online discount bookseller and not much more, in the UK at least. The relentless ploughing back of profits into the technology and pricing coupled with understanding the value of owning your own code that early in the journey was impressive.
It doesn’t seem like it now, 25 years on, but at a time when most people only had access to a computer at the office and mobile phones did precisely what they said, allowed you to make a call while mobile and not much more, customer take up was not guaranteed. Amazon and its investors were bold and patient. It is an extraordinary achievement in a very short space of time. Few businesses transform an industry. Amazon has done that.
Your overall favourite store?
Selfridges, particularly the food hall. The visual feast is simply art, and this has always been my favourite food hall. I think they get the balance just right between theatre and being a real food shop. It was the only place you could get weird stuff, like squid ink or a whole pig, which you can sometimes see being carried out on the shoulder of a butcher’s assistant. You could call up the fish department at five in the morning (second note to self to get a life) and ask them to put the correct sort of fish bones aside for you as they were filleting their fish.
The cinema, the variety of restaurants and cafes, and the depth of the range means that people with different budgets and tastes can all go shopping for different things on different floors, meet to eat or drink coffee and finish the day with a movie. It has stood the test of time in a fast changing retail world and on one of the more challenging shopping streets in London.
The store you’d like to take to the desert island?
The practical answer is probably an RNLI shop. Or a Screwfix. But I am going to answer this more in the ‘Richard Branson has lent me his private island’ mode so Daunt Books in Marylebone. North London is peppered with little independent bookshops and I am spoilt for choice – West End Lane books and Primrose Hill books definitely deserve a mention, the latter has a second-hand section where you can pick up a bargain. I have always loved reading and the huge choice, in a beautiful building with friendly and knowledgeable staff, with a vast amount of great coffee available nearby is just a dream. That it is always full, with queues at the till, is comforting. I have never bought a book on Amazon – I know it’s usually cheaper – but if you don’t support the stores you love, they won’t survive. My perfect combo would be Daunt Books, Hedonism Wines, and a corkscrew and a farmers market.
