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I have spent the last few weeks providing commercial support to the traders who work on Burnley Market in this beautiful part of Lancashire. Its always a pleasure working alongside groups of small independent and enthusiastic traders and these enterprising traders did not disappoint. At the same time the diverse nature of their business types and models provided a real opportunity to flex the full range of my business experience across retail, and catering. It was a pleasure to see how keen these small traders where to access support that is not normally available to them and for me to have the opportunity to work with a group of developing businesses. It was also nice to deliver a mixed bag of personal visits and zoom sessions which increased the flexibility for sole traders to access my support services. There were many highlights and I covered a wide range of topics from merchandising to brand support, and e-commerce to book-keeping over a three week period. For me the most interesting experience was helping two young ladies establishing new businesses one clothing and one catering with their business and launch plans and I wish both every success in their new ventures.
This last week I have been involved in a fascinating project at Brandon Marsh Visitor Centre the home of Warwickshire Wildlife Trust. They are looking at ways of re-fitting and re-designing their current retail shop but on a restricted budget. Their existing shop is roomy and well laid out, but suffers from a mix of unsuitable sales units for visual merchandising and also units from many different sources so presenting a disjointed look. The staff their had absolutely correctly identified these issues, but wanted some creative retail assistance to re-design the shop to give it a unified a more modern and visually appealing appearance. With a strict budget a total re-fit was not feasible, so I`ve been designing a mixture of new retail units to replace the oldest and most glaringly out of place fixtures while at the same time designing a cost effective refurbishment of the better existing units. The whole design is in a new clean, white aesthetic, with a new layout that should give a new feel to the shop.
I recently had the great pleasure of helping Portland Basin Museum in Tameside review their product rangers and suppliers as they look to reopening with the aim of realigning their offer in line with their ethos and collections. This was a brilliant opportunity for any consultant who loves Industrial Archaeology Sites and is a devotee of sustainable trade, and allowed me to demonstrate what could be achieved by thinking outside the box and using sustainable trading companies to bring in exciting green ranges that relate to Industrial Heritage Venues. These are just a few of the ideas that came together over the process and work perfectly in this terrific venues canal side setting. These ranges ticked the boxes for both sustainable suppliers and unique objects directly relating to collections here. Circular & Co. – A Cornish Company with a strong eco ethos it produces all its products from recycled materials such as single use coffee cups, plastics, old slate, broken plant pots etc. Its range is extensive covering Homewares, Garden, and House ranges. Nutscene – A UK company in Forfar they preserve the heritage of British Jute manufacture retailing their jute produced traditionally on machinery dating back to 1922. They also use old spools, shuttles and bobbins in a garden range that would fit well in any area with a history in the textile industry. Black Country Metal Works – A UK foundry based in Shropshire amongst other ranges it produces a range of traditional canal ware in traditional “Roses and Castle” patterns and colours in their Canal Art Buckby range. They take trade orders and also have a range of modern canal chandlery for boats. Kate Thornton Cards –Is a British Artist who produces a range of greeting cards and prints from her studio in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. She has also been working closely with independent shops, galleries and museums for over a decade. By the joining together of vintage materials, pops of colour and a simple graphic style creates contemporary work that has both historic and personal connection. A connection made between people, place and natural landscapes in the use of old maps. Kate works in paper-cut, drawing, printmaking and digital design to produce print and stationery collections.
As museums and other visitor attractions start to plan to re-open as the lockdown restrictions ease following the covid-19 pandemic, many of you will need to maximise your income to help re-build your business. One way to do this is through improving your commercial offer. To help venues address this area, I am pleased to announce a new series of retail support webinars I have developed with the support of Historic England will be released in March. Airing twice a week from the 9th of March they are an update of last years webinar series with the added addition of new requested topics to be discussed. This series of free webinars with question-and-answer sessions on a range of commercial topics will hopefully provide the ideal preparation to re-opening in the spring. These will include advice on working within Covid-19 restrictions guidelines. The details are as follows:- 9th March - The Retail Experience 10th March - Merchandising 16th March - Getting the Café Offer Right 17th March - Events 23rd March - Sustainable and Green Commerce 24th March - On-line Trading. 30th March – Security in Commercial Operations Places are limited so please book your tickets for these free seminars at Eventbrite
Recently as part of a project funded by Historic England, I had the experience of developing, writing and delivering a series of five Webinars on Commercial Skills for Heritage Venues. The aim was to make them deliverable during Covid-19 lockdown to help venues in their recovery process, so the obvious route to follow was the Webinar. Although I had considerable experience of writing and delivering training through standard live presentations, this was a very new medium for me and something of a step into the unknown. The writing of the script proved relatively straight forward as it differed little from a standard training script, it was the technology and marketing that delivered the surprises and learning curves. To begin with choosing a platform to deliver it on. I was already familiar with a couple as an attendee and Zoom seemed an obvious choice to me. However, there is a world of difference between being an attendee at zoom meeting and using it to deliver webinars. To begin with there was the cost implication as to fully use Zoom as a webinar platform for more than 25 guests required subscribing to their professional version which worked out at £52.00 per month. This seemed a lot, but it did open up a world of tools I could use. The platform itself is fairly easy to navigate around when setting up webinars and recording them once you`ve mastered the set-up pages and Zoom very helpfully have webinars online to teach you how to do this. The next problem I faced was advertising the free webinars and ticketing them as they were limited to 100 per webinar, and I wanted a way of researching the audience. My own and Historic England`s networks were really useful for getting the word out using social media, but I also decided to pay for a three week run of e-adverts on the Museum Association web site to increase the reach. Here I found another new challenge. I have written adverting script but never designed an advert including graphics before and had a noticeably short deadline so a very rough learning curve especially around sizing to fit specific space. However, using Adobe Spark and with some editing from Paint 3D and after a lot of trail and error I produced a top banner that worked and went out 3 days a week for 3 weeks and was very successful. The banner was linked to the Eventbrite booking page so clicking on sent viewers straight there. So, this mastered it next came to ticketing. Luckily, I had considerable experience through my previous Events role of using Eventbrite, so this was a no brainer when it came to choosing this. I set up the five events individually as free events and also designed an ad page that went out on Eventbrite. Eventbrite is a great tool for organising and monitoring ticket sales and its post event analytics are fantastic and provide really good information. So, the logistics of webinars sorted it now came to the delivery. I had planned for wider accessibility reasons that they would be recorded and available for free with a transcript on my web site. This proved a sound idea and they actually had more viewings than the live version by a ratio of 3:1. The site provider Ionos also provide good analytics to show hits on the webinars recordings. Each webinar was designed to last approximately one hour including a question and answer session, but “after delivery of the first session on “The Retail Experience” it became obvious that this format was not only exhausting for me but also the audience, so following this session I had a redesign of the scripts to include more question and answer breaks and information exchanges to make the sessions more interactive and lively, and this was a real improvement and certainly something I would recommend. I chose to use a simple standard icon design for the presentation graphics that I thought would be sharp yet clean and not too distracting for a webinar. The other issue I found with the first webinar was the technical problem around losing sound during the opening section, this came down to the recording so I acquired a headset and mic for the further sessions which solved this issue, and again I would recommend this. However, I learned and grew more confident with each webinar presented, and by the final one had mastered my way around using Zoom to host a large gathering on my own. The feedback has been really pleasing and the webinars well received from a large and diverse group of historic venues and attractions from across the whole country and abroad which I was a little surprised but pleased by. They certainly met my original aim and have given me the confidence and skills to develop more webinars going forward.
As museums and other visitor attractions start to plan to re-open as the lockdown restrictions ease following the covid-19 pandemic, many of you will need to maximise your income to help re-build your business. One way to do this is through improving your commercial offer. To help venues address this area I have developed, with the support of Historic England, a series of free webinars with question and answer sessions on a range of commercial topics over the next few months. These will include advice on working within Covid-19 restrictions guidelines. The series will include 7th July - The Retail Experience – book here 14th July - Getting the Café Offer Right – book here 21st July – Events – book here 28th July - Sustainable and Green Commerce – book here 4th August - On-line Trading – book here Places are limited so please book your tickets for these free seminars at Eventbrite: - For further information please contact me at info@michaelwhitworth.org.uk or visit my web site www.michaelwhitworth.org.uk