Singh’s on song in Sheffield

A year on from the relaunch of a store in Sheffield featuring the best of the Premier symbol group, SLR paid a visit and found a business that’s absolutely flying.

By Antony Begley

Covid has a lot to answer for, putting an end to lots of things for a couple of years – including store visits for trade journalists. Which is why SLR found itself travelling down to Sheffield for a hands-on look at Singh’s Premier Store on Teynham Road in Sheffield last month, a full year after the store had been utterly reimagined during a £400k refit.

Working closely with Premier, the concept was to deliver the very best of Premier in a relatively small 1,750sq ft store. The Singh’s business has been with Premier for 30 years and the Teynham Road store was very well established and doing well, so the challenge for the Singh brothers – Mandeep, Vrinder and Baljeet – was to see how much growth they could squeeze out of a store that on the face of it didn’t look like it had all that much potential.

Spoiler alert: quite a lot of growth is the simple answer. Sales increased from £35k a week to a whopping £65k a week, footfall increased by 20% and margins shot up 6% to an eye-watering 28%. And the growth hasn’t flattened out yet.

Or, to put it another way, the brothers will recoup the £400k they spent in just 12 months.

The question of how exactly they managed that sort of stellar growth is what we went down to find out.

Mandeep Singh explains the most major improvements that were made to the store, and they’re actually relatively simple: “We opened up the shop front to let customers see in and to make those inside feel comfortable. We added a Refresh@Premier drinks-to-go zone with high margin, with self-service lines like F’real, Tango Ice Blast, Fanta Frozen, Jolly Rancher, Hershey Milk Shakes and coffee and hot chocolate.

“We added a food-to-go deli counter and a beer cave. We massively increased the vaping section and put it on the shop floor, and we also increased the chilled and frozen range. Fresh and long-life sales have grown from £1.5k a week to £6k a week, so it’s working.”

To make space the brothers thinned-out slower categories like ambient grocery, where they adopted a ‘less is more’ strategy and delisted about 30% of the range.

The thing that is most obvious about the store is that there is not a single square foot of space that is being wasted or even underutilised. Every inch is delivering sales and profits.

The focus on high margin lines like drinks-to-go, vaping and food-to-go has delivered in spades. There can’t be too many stores out there hitting margins of 28% on a weekly basis.

Mandeep did admit that not everything worked 100% but accepts that it’s “all part of the learning curve”.

He highlights that “you don’t have to get everything right all the time, you just have know your business well enough so that you can spot when something isn’t working the way you want it and then fix it.”

A case in point is the vaping section. It’s already doing £5k a week but the team have reworked the fixture on several occasions to the reflect the latest trends, with the most recent change increasing the space for the vaping bars that are dominating the category at the moment.

The store also majors on local sourcing and, increasingly, is shifting more and more space to multipacks and larger format packs across lots of categories: crisps and snacks, soft drinks and beers in the large beer cave.

“Some of that shift is down to home delivery,” explains Mandeep. “When people are making orders, they often order larger formats or multipacks and that’s easy to understand.”

Which takes us nicely to a real game-changer: home delivery. Singh’s have long been doing home delivery, from pre-pandemic times, but Covid turned it into a massive opportunity that the brothers certainly weren’t going to pass up.

Using Zeus Labs on Facebook, a pretty simple solution, the store now makes use a team of drivers and fleet of vehicles of various kinds, all badged up under the ‘Singh’s Drop’ logo. They deliver within half an hour, charge store prices and they market the service extremely heavily on social media – which is a little easier when you have over 30,000 followers, as they do.

The store now does in excess of £20k a week in delivery sales with 85% of orders being repeat business and 90% of home delivery customers new customers, in the sense of not being historic customers of the store. Basket spend for delivery orders is 300% higher than basket spend in-store.

Mandeep says the service is still growing and, somewhat astonishingly, told SLR that “we expect delivery sales to outstrip store sales within the next two to three years.”

For Martyn Parkinson, Booker Retail Sales Director, the store is a perfect example for other Premier retailers to follow.

He told SLR: “We know that not everyone has £400,000 to invest or enough space to accommodate all the new concepts and ideas in this store, but the concept is largely modular so other retailers can pick and choose the elements they think would work in their store for their demographic.

“The changes we’ve made at Singh’s are changes any Premier retailer could make and the evidence that the concept works is there for all to see. Moving forward I expect to see many more stores implement some or all of these elements.”

So far, Parkinson says no fewer than 352 retailers have visited the store for a nosey, and very few leave uninspired.

“It all comes down to understanding your customer,” concludes Mandeep. “Understand what they want. Just ask them, they’ll tell you. And if you deliver what they want and you can have a bit of fun and banter along the way, you won’t go far wrong.”

Take it from a man who clearly knows.