David Robertson’s remarkable hybrid JP Pozzi business in Buckie has been built on a steadfast commitment to the newstrade category, a commitment that serves him well to this day.
By Antony Begley
One of the many imponderables of the local retailing trade in Scotland is the way in which the sector has, to a remarkable extent, allowed the newstrade category to wither on the vine. When retailers are looking for space for a new Costa machine, news is the first category to get either moved to the back of the shop or removed entirely.
Granted, it’s not an easy category to manage but it’s worth asking a simple question: if the news category didn’t exist and we invented it tomorrow, how many retailers would be all over it? How many other categories deliver the sorts of seven-day footfall, sales and ancillary impulse purchases that news does? The margins aren’t great – but they’re not bad and they’re certainly better than the margins you get in many other categories.
And if you want to know what happens when you don’t take your eye off the news ball, you could do worse than take a drive up to Buckie on the north Aberdeenshire coast to see David Robertson’s JP Pozzi business.
- 78,000 Press & Journal a year
- 22,000 Daily Mail a year
- 20,000 Sun a year
- 10,000 Daily Record a year
To be clear, it’s anything but a traditional convenience store. A born entrepreneur, David makes no bones of the fact that sales and profits are what he’s after and he’s prepared to go wherever that journey takes him. Which explains why JP Pozzi is essentially three businesses in one, but each element of the model has been carefully crafted over many years to perfectly meet the needs of David’s customer base. And the entire business was built with the newstrade at its foundations.
Firstly, there’s the most traditional part of the business, the bit that looks most like a recognisable store. But unlike many traditional newsagents, it looks pukka. The design is modern and clean. It has a vaguely Prêt a Manger feel about it. News features heavily both in the centre of the shopfloor and magazines dominate a wall by the counter.
The second element of the hybrid model is basically a coffee shop with tables and chairs, again fitted out to a very good standard.
The third and most unlikely element of the business – Pozzi Bijou – is a sort of high-end gift shop selling an extensive range of jewellery, gifts, stationery and party items. Once again, it has been done to a very high standard and wouldn’t look out of place in a city centre department store like Frasers.
Just along the road, David also has another JP Pozzi store focusing more on gifting and also owns two other Bijou stores in nearby Elgin and Portessie. He owns six sites, operates three himself and has tenants in the other three and employs 62 staff. An entrepreneur indeed, but a newspaper man to his core.
But what really lies at the heart of the JP Pozzi mini empire is news home delivery. A family business, David is carrying on the legacy by taking the original vision and moulding it for the future – but he has never lost sight of the importance of the home delivery services that built the business in the first place.
To get an idea of the scale of the home delivery business, consider that from this beautiful but very small store, David delivers something in the region of 78,000 copies of the Press & Journal a year, almost 20,000 copies of The Sun, more than 22,000 copies of The Daily Mail and around 10,000 copies of The Daily Record.
Operating out of a dedicated home delivery hub room at the back of the store, the slick operation runs like clockwork after years of honing and David delivers to Cullen, Portessie, Buckie, Portgordon, Spey Bay and beyond.
He has been quick to pick up other delivery businesses as they become available and is now widely regarded as one of Scotland’s leading experts on all things news and magazines – and he’s not afraid to speak his mind, routinely ruffling the feathers of publishers, the NFRN and anyone else he feels could do with some friendly words of advice.
“There’s no question that the news category is getting harder and harder but the thing I don’t understand is why so many retailers have backed out of the category,” he says. “Back in the day, you didn’t have to work too hard at it. It more or less took care of itself. These days you have to work at it, but the rewards are there if you’re prepared to put that work in. News is still a profitable category for retailers that do it well.
“It isn’t a one-size-fits-all category so you need to dig in and understand what your customers want. And you need to be flexible and change with the times. We all know that people don’t buy newspapers as often as they used to, but the market is still significant and the margins are decent. They’re getting squeezed all the time but they’re still decent.”
To help keep his business on track, David has had to constantly evolve how he manages the category, reworking runs to drive efficiencies, carefully calculating delivery charges, managing ever-increasing cover charges and working with publishers to incentivise customers to take out subscriptions.
“We charge £2.40 in town but more for out-of-town or build deliveries because we need to use drivers for those,” explains David. “We deliver to hospitals and such like and the boys can’t do that, so we build a robustness into the delivery charges that lets us cope with increased cover charges and so on.
“The fact is that for too long, paper cover charges were too cheap so customers got used to paying buttons for a paper, so when they go up you get resistance but it’s still a very valuable category.”
And it’s that pragmatic, entrepreneurial can-do approach that has spilled over into the diversification of the business. The coffee shop was a natural extension and a good use of the available space while the Bijou side of the business has exploded in recent years.
“Pozzi Bijou is pretty well known in the area now and we’ve worked hard to build a reputation,” he says. “It has grown and grown and it’s working really well. It complements the news side of the business perfectly. The margins we get in Bijou are phenomenal and we get the volume too. I buy very carefully, and I keep a close eye on trends so that we’re always up to date. We sell the sorts of items that people can’t get anywhere else in the area, and it works.”
That entrepreneurial drive coupled with a commitment to investment in his business and to doing everything right is what sets David apart and what saw him crowned as SLR Newstrade Retailer of the Year.
He has built a unique business by following his spirit and by being unafraid to dismiss convention and simply listening to what his customers want – and giving them it in style.
