Following a comprehensive review of the spirits offering at Woodlands Local with our partner Maxxium, last month saw the fixture re-ranged and re-merchandised.
by Antony Begley
If you read last month’s SLR, you’ll know that we had just completed a review of the spirits category with our partners Maxxium and had identified a number of areas for improvement.
The general idea is to make more of the range in order to use spirits as a footfall driver, making the store more useful to a wider audience of spirits drinkers. In practice this meant two things: enhancing the range and adopting a better pricing policy.
New lines added:
- Courvoiser VS 70cl
- Courvoiser VS 35cl
- Three Barrels 70cl
- Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey 70cl
- Glenmorangie 70cl
- Laphroaig 70cl
- Drambuie 70cl
Maxxium’s Paul Smith had highlighted a number of omissions from our core range, as well as a good number of lines which, frankly, shouldn’t be taking up valuable shelf space in the store. A couple of tweaks were also made to improve the range of fractionals available for sale.
With the new plan in hand, Paul Smith and colleague Katie Megson visited the store in early January to implement it. Much of the fixture remained unchanged but the important developments took place around the edges.
The key changes
The top shelf was upweighted with the addition of a few congnac and brandy SKUs as well as some of the most popular single malt Scotch whiskies. Liqueurs and specialities were moved to the bottom shelf and the blocking for blended whiskies, rums, vodkas and gins were tidied up.
Paul Smith commented: “Katie and I found the trip to Woodlands Local extremely useful, not least because it gave us a great insight into the practical problems that retailers face when implementing supplier planograms.
“The planograms may be extremely well thought out but with every independent retailing outlet being different, it can be challenging to implement the planogram with 100% accuracy. That’s why we take a very pragmatic, flexible approach to working with retailers to tailor our planogram very precisely to their specific requirements. Only by doing what is right for the retailer will we achieve the success we are all aiming for.”
The next stage is to add some bespoke POS that we’re working on together and perhaps add some new dedicated shelf edge strips. We are also looking at the pricing of spirits in the stores around us (Lidl, Asda) and intend to take a formal position on where the store’s pricing should be.
This is likely to see us match the supermarkets and discounters on our very high volume lines (budget vodkas for the most part) then bring the remainder of the lines into something that may not quite match our multiple competitors but isn’t a million miles away.
Malt matters
We are also working on a dedicated malt whisky display containing more unusual lines, broken down by the key regions – Highland, Island, Speyside. This again plays to our strategy of delivering unique selling points against our competitors.
We are also working on a range of rarer craft ales that will also set us apart from other stores in Falkirk. Keep an eye out in future issues to see how we get on.
