Talking Retail Grocery and product news for independent retailers
Over the course of 2022, Independent Retail News has been running a joint project with Unilever to highlight its Partners for Growth programme, which aims to provide trusted, impartial category advice to help retailers grow sales and profitability.
Unilever’s Partners for Growth initiative covers a range of key categories, including homecare, laundry, personal care and pot snacks, and has been running for nearly 20 years.
The joint “Partners in Action” roadshow kicked off in May with a visit to Dhamecha cash and carry in Croydon, south London, to meet independent retailers and find out how they were catering for consumer needs in the household and personal care categories.
The visit was headed up by David Harper, wholesale lead at Unilever UK, along with customer account manager Radia Ahsan. They spoke to retailers to share information about Partners for Growth, and encouraged them to take a fresh look at their fixtures when they returned to their stores.
Insight and advice
Said Harper: “After a couple of years when to some extent retailers have been forced to stock whatever they can get hold of, now is a time for them to look carefully at their categories to make sure they are stocking the right range.” One retailer who spoke with Partners for Growth at the depot was Sue Nithyanandan of Costcutter Epsom, in Surrey, who said she had faced exactly that situation and was now looking to get back on track by re-focusing on the best sellers. She was selected to receive a store visit during which Harper would share insight and advice on three key categories: household, laundry and personal care.
The 3,000sq ft store, which Sue Nithyanandan runs along with her husband Nithy, stocks a broad range of products, including one side of a whole aisle dedicated to household and toiletries, as well as other non-food lines such as pet food and baby care. Harper felt they were already doing “a pretty good job” on personal care, including a strong selection of the best-sellers, a variety of different formats, and products to cover different demographics, including both men and women.
Older customers
He nevertheless recommended a number of tweaks. In men’s deodorants, for example, while teenagers were well catered for with four varieties of Lynx, he also suggested adding in some DoveMen+Care lines, which are aimed at a slightly older demographic. In other areas, there was scope to streamline the range, with just one brand of bar soap, for example, making room for other products such as moisturising lotion.
On the laundry fixture, the Nithyanandans were doing a similarly good job. Suggestions here included cutting down on the number of own-brand washing liquids from the existing five facings, and giving over more space to capsules, the fastest-growing sub-category in laundry.
Six months on from the store visit and Sue Nithyanandan reports things are progressing well. “I took a comparison of sales before the Unilever visit and after, and we have incremental sales of about £150 a month, which is roughly 5%. The positive from the visit is that I am now aware of the best-selling items in the category and have streamlined the space in line with the advice.
I feel every retailer should have the opportunity to have this information and help to re-merchandise and remove unnecessary lines and bring in items that turn over faster. It is important that retailers make time to implement these small but important tweaks to their range.”
Snacking fixture
The second depot visit was to Bestway’s flagship cash and carry in Park Royal, north-west London, where the focus was on the pot snacks and noodles category. Again, Harper was there to hand out leaflets and dispense advice to retailers as they loaded up their trollies. “We are renewing our call to the trade to give the best space to the best sellers,” he said. “It helps retailers decide what to put on their shelves and helps shoppers to find what they are looking for.”
This time, the retailer receiving the store visit and fixture re-lay was Sasi Karan, who runs Best-one Tower Stores in Wapping, east London. Keen to boost sales of pot snacks and noodles, he invited Partners for Growth back to the 1,450sq ft shop to take a look at the category and share its advice.
Sales uplift
His fixture, made up of four 1.5-metre shelves, was well located opposite chilled sandwiches, in order to cater for shoppers looking to grab lunch on-the-go. But it also featured several lines – such as Sharwoods noodles – that did not belong on the snacking feature, and these were moved into the ‘meal for tonight’ section alongside rice, pasta and cooking sauces. Harper also brought in several facings of the best-selling Pot Noodle brand, which has a 39% share of the market.
Four weeks on from the visit, and Karan says sales from his pot snacks and noodles fixture are up by about 20%, with Pot Noodle doing particularly well.
Similar changes
“It was a fantastic idea to merchandise the different variants of Pot Noodle in that way,” he says, adding that he has already recommended similar changes to a fellow retailer across the Thames in south-east London. “I would encourage all independent retailers to take up this sort of category advice wherever it’s available,” he says.
SPONSOR’S COMMENT
David Harper, wholesale lead, Unilever UK
“Selling what shoppers want is the foundation of a retailers’ business, and category management provides the cornerstone of optimal range and best practice merchandising.
“At Unilever, we know how important it is for retailers to have access to category advice they can trust to be unbiased and work for them, which is why we launched Partners for Growth in 2003.
“Compiled by category experts, the dedicated free impartial resource is designed to help retailers make the right ranging and merchandising choices for their store, addressing the millions of pounds in sales lost each year simply because shoppers could not find what they were looking for.
“Given the current unprecedented cost-of-living challenges shoppers and retailers are facing, we felt it was the right time to work with Independent Retail News magazine on the Partners in Action project, so we could share the Partners for Growth category-growing advice with retailers, in depots.
“It is encouraging to hear that both Sue and Sasi have already seen very positive results following the reviews of their categories. But it is particularly pleasing that, based on their experiences, they are urging other retailers to try our advice in their stores.”
