Q&A: David Pike, Group MD for Calendar Club
Calendar Club specialises in retailing calendars, diaries, planners and gifts during the busy Christmas shopping season. They have stores and an ecommerce website.
Can you tell us a bit about you?
I moved to the South West as group managing director just over 10 years ago. Our small group comprises 3 businesses: Calendar Club (the largest retailer of calendars in the UK), Carousel Publishing (the largest publisher and distributor of calendars in the UK) and Otter House (best known for greeting cards, jigsaws, and calendars in garden centres). We’re based in Exeter with a turnover of around £35m.
My role is focussed on delivering the overall business strategy, but a large portion of my time is also spent on real estate and store acquisitions for Calendar Club.
Ten years may seem like quite a while but I’m still enjoying it. We’re very much a seasonal business so each year the business almost ‘refreshes’ itself which keeps it interesting. To me, retail is fascinating, it’s going through such a process of change, which is challenging and interesting and I work with a talented team of colleagues which makes it all worthwhile.
What’s special about your company?
Calendar Club is an unusual retail business, in September each year we have 0 stores and by the end of the month we reach around 300 stores or kiosks (pop ups) at our peak. We also trade online.
We are a very agile business and this offers us a huge advantage. In the extreme, we can sign a lease on Monday, build and stock it on Tuesday and open for trade on the Wednesday. This schedule would be alien to most retailers, but we’re used to it, it’s quite a feat.
Calendars are a fantastic product. For under £10 you can buy a quality gift that lasts 12 months and looks great on the wall. Plus, you can personalise it; if Uncle James loves old cars, you can pick up a classic car calendar that he will treasure and for a low price point.
We have a 20-year history in this space, so we know calendars inside out. Our team are perceptive and evolve as trends do. The entertainment category for example changes each year as pop stars come in and out of fashion, but generally our best sellers are based on patterns which we know well.
How has business been over the last 18 months?
Like many retailers, we’ve had to think on our feet. Last year we reduced our number of stores by about 100 and our capacity too. We came through Covid OK but mostly because we made decisions early which was vital. We also shifted our rent models to be turnover based. This flexibility was a real saving grace – a sensible move and we are very grateful to our landlords and agents for the flexibility they showed in this.
Are you finding store procurement easier right now?
The nature of our business is one of the reasons for our success, we’re very seasonal. This allows us to ‘pop up’ in the last quarter of the year and landlords generally like us because of this characteristic. But, although you would think finding space would be easier right now, it’s not been.
Vacancies are higher but landlords have been slower to respond. Earlier in the year many were still dealing with rent collections as a fall out of Covid, others are being cautious. Procurement is proving a challenge.
Any lessons learnt from Covid?
One thing that we learnt from Covid was just how important stores are to us. Like many retailers, our online traffic (and sales) just about doubled. We had to as a business discuss and work out what this may mean for our future. What we realised was that although online was thriving, we could not sustain the same breadth of range without our store numbers. Instore we typically have around 1,200 products – few other High Street stores would get as high as 300 different calendars. We realised that having stores allowed us to have the wide range that we do, and our range is important to us.
What challenges are retailers facing pre-Christmas?
We are suffering like every retailer right now with freight delays. Moreover, for our calendar publishing business we have seen freight costs increased by a factor of five or six times, I’ve also heard stories from some of our other suppliers of containers costing more than $20,000 to bring stock in which pre-Covid would have been around $2,000. This challenge is compounded by the lorry driver shortages. Without sufficient lorries to clear ports, ships can’t unload, and the result is of course further delays to stock deliveries.
Staffing is another real difficulty. We’re finding it tough to get staff into our warehouses and stores. This is being compounded by wage inflation. If we are going to need to increase wages to get in temporary staff, this will have a knock-on effect to our permanent staff. It feels that the reluctance of the government to address these problems is being driven by anti-immigration politics rather than a focus of what is right for the economy. It is having a very detrimental impact on businesses.
What initiatives are important to the business?
Climate change is a priority for us. We’re aiming to be carbon neutral by the end of 2022 and have implemented a lot of initiatives around this goal over the last 3 years which we’re enormously proud of.
We are moving towards our calendars no longer being shrink wrapped with single use plastic and we have made a number of changes within our head office building, such as changing over all of our lighting to LED lights, making changes to our IT infrastructure to reduce energy usage and all company cars are now hybrids. We are now also working across our global supply chain to reduce our indirect carbon footprint. It’s an enormous project and I’m grateful we have such a capable team in place to drive this forward.
