Justina reports to BBC Essex’s Ian Wyatt about the launch of Hope Footwear, the store in Chelmsford reopened by the team that used to work there, all by themselves! Find out more over at www.hopefootwear.co.uk
This recording was first broadcast on BBC Essex Radio Saturday 3 July 2010 at 8.55am, one hour before the store opened.
Listen below:
For those that did not already know, I’m working with Justina and Roxanne to open Hope Footwear Ltd in the Meadows Shopping Centre, Chelmsford. This is a real feel good story about how two girls fight back after redundancy and reopen the store they used to work in.
Read the press release here: http://www.hopefootwear.co.uk/hope_pressrelease.html
Listen to Roxanne on BBC Essex’s Dave Monk Show talking about Hope here:
Roxanne Ransom of Hope talks to Dave Monk on BBC Essex Tuesday 29 June 2010 at 9.30am: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadBack in October last year I was featured on BBC Essex Radio covering the traffic in Springfield Road in Chelmsford, click here to read what I had to say, and listen to the BBC Essex recording.
As a persistent travel moaner on Twitter (my words) I was approached and asked to comment to BBC Essex Richard Martin on the A12 widening at Hatfield Peveral and Witham, the feature was part of the Ray Clark Breakfast Show.
The broadcast happened outside D’s Cafe just off the Hatfield Peveral slip road.
Richard asked the lady from D’s to talk about how the new roadworks would impact on trade, and the lady from D’s took the moment to promote her
business.
It is about time the A12 was widened between Witham and Hatfield Peveral, it has been trouble for years.
Listen to the recording here:
BBC Essex Radio The Ray Clark Breakfast Show (Interview with Richard Martin) 04/11/2009 (07:25am): Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadThis morning I was driving to work, Chris Moyles was playing a dodgy song on Radio 1 so I skipped through the frequencies to be faced with four stations called ‘Heart’. They were called ‘Heart’, ‘Heart’, ‘Heart’ and ‘Heart’.
What I found was each ‘Heart’ station had a different set of presenters presenting the same-ish Breakfast Show, with the same jingles, the same music playlist, just different news and travel. I was confused.
A little bit of research on the internet I found….
102.6 and 96.3 - ‘Essex FM’ (my local commercial radio station) is now called ‘Heart’.
103.1 and 102.8 - ‘Invicta FM’ (Kent station can be picked up in Essex) is now called ‘Heart’.
96.1 - ‘SGR Colchester’ is now called ‘Heart’.
and
106.2 - ‘Heart’ is the London ‘Heart’ station that can be picked up in Essex.
So, when driving along the A12 what do I listen to? ‘Heart’, ‘Heart’, ‘Heart’ or ‘Heart’? All four stations display ‘Heart’ on the display, all four stations seem to play the same songs, although, the clue is in the advertising. I was listening to 103.1 FM’s ‘Heart’ for a good twenty minutes, the adverts were for Kent companies, no good for me in Essex! ‘Heart’ had successfully attracted an Essex listener to unknowingly listen to Kent based local show with Kent local adverts, I bet Kent specific advertisers love paying for me to listen to their advert, and wonder how many Kent based people are listening to the Essex based frequencies?
What has happened here is that Global Radio UK have bought lots of local radio stations and rebranded them as ‘Heart’. Each Heart frequency has been left so the breakfast time and drive time presenters still present local based shows, but the rest of the day is delivered across the entire network from the London studios. So me listening to the Kent Breakfast Show on ‘Heart’ was an easy mistake, and I’d need to learn all the frequencies in order to get the right local show.
Local radio is not local radio anymore.
Essex FM, was a good station, although towards the end it played the same music all day long, with a guaranteed ‘Chasing Cars’, ‘Wake me up before September ends’, ‘I don’t feel like dancing’ and at least three ‘Take That’ songs every hour.
Heart may attract national advertising budgets by telling advertisers their advert will by played across the entire Heart network at the same time, but what Heart is missing is that local audiences expect local content, and in calling everything ‘Heart’ will they attract local advertising anymore? I guess with all the breakfast shows seeming to be sponsored by double glazing companies the barrel is already being scraped.
Bye bye Essex FM, thanks for the trip in the Essex FM Jam Buster Travel Plane in 1994. I’m going to try Chelmsford Radio now for local stuff.
P.S…. I note you are still playing the same old stuff….
As news breaks of the last ever bag of Woolworths Pick n’ Mix selling on Ebay for £14,500 I thought I’d pen some thoughts on the whole demise of the high street and why some people deserve recognition for doing something typically British: keep calm and carry on.
It was great to read about Claire Robertson, the former ‘Woolworths of Dorchester’ branch manager who is taking the courage to reopen her store, the very same store administrators closed when Woolworths Plc went into administration late last year.
Britain loves to get behind the underdog and this story about one shop has generated local, national and international coverage; it has created enough buzz and press to unintentionally steal the limelight from Shop Direct, who won the auction for Woolworths trading name earlier this month. I wonder how many former Woolworth store managers and staff teams are looking on and thinking “why are we not doing that with our own old store?”
What Ms Robertson has successfully tapped into is that Woolworth’s does not have to be called Woolworths to be Woolworths, and with a little twist and affectionate nod to the old name her ‘Wellworths’ venture is enough to win curiosity and respect while successfully generating nothing but praise and admiration at the same time.
What the people at ‘Shop Direct’ are missing from their totally online re-birth of the Woolworths brand is that all they own is the Woolworths name, and we the British public know that. The British public and its purse had already left Woolworths, and those who had shopped at Woolworths right up to its closure will now be discovering other retailers. The key thing the British public will remember about ‘Woolies’ was it was a value and convenience store, based on the high street, and they will remember too that although it remained convenient, it was no longer a place of value and sent out confusing signals about what it sold and why people should step inside.
While I aged and grew out of Woolworths the younger generation failed to even grow into it, Woolworths was not selling what the market demanded and promptly went out of business. As a child of the 80’s Woolworths was a place where toys lived, as I got older it became a place where music and DVD’s were purchased before it was more cost effective to buy them (as a download) online. In my early twenties Woolworths was the place to buy Easter eggs before it was cheaper and more convenient to get them in the supermarket as part of the weekly shop. The big problem Woolworths had was that it had become a store that survived on its customers wandering through it and picking up things on impulse, and a shop like that has no place in a recession, which is exactly why it went bust and the likes of Theo Paphitis and other retail turnaround specialists did not spend their children’s inheritance to wade in and rescue the company.
The other big problem Woolworths had failed to fight was the rise of two competitors who started to beat it at its own business model, ‘Wilkinson’s’ and ‘Pound Land’. Pound Land trades from stores much the same size as Woolworths while Wilkinsons went for larger shops with a bigger range at a lower prices. While the music industry moved to digital download unlike Woolworths the team at Wilkinsons scaled down its CD and DVD operations and focused much more on home style products. Pound Land filled the front of its store with low priced kitchen and bathroom consumables which drew the customer in and while they were there a Pound Land basket would then be filled with things people don’t really need, but are too good a price to miss. Last time I was in Pound Land I bought a trowel, iPod charging lead, two wallpaper scrapers, some kitchen roll and a packet of Jammie Dodgers. A fiver would not stretch that much in Woolworths, but in its heyday, it would have. Woolworths invented the low price thrift model in the UK and then let two rivals (and others) grow in their market and do it better than them, Wilkinson’s even joined in on the Pick ‘n Mix, and did that cheaper too, Wilco’s was beating Woolies at the its own game.
It could be argued that Woolworths products were always good quality, I’m cautious now of the things that are carried by Pound Land, the screwdrivers are made of cheap metal that is breaks away when turning a screw, the glasses are too thin and crack when dropped in a sink, and the razor blades are too blunt, but they only cost a pound, what do we expect? Sadly to compete with these stores I’d argue that in the last couple of years for the first time the buyers at Woolworths started to buy in low quality products of their own, at a higher price, and started to scare even more customers away.
A quick surf over to my colleague Hal MacLean’s blog and he reflects: “It’s a shame Woolies has gone, but in the cold light of day you have got to ask what on earth were their buyers doing?! How completely out of touch.” And Hal is right, as he pockets for nostalgic reasons his ‘Life-like (?) Animal’ for the severely discounted price which ‘Pound Land’ would have sold him a packet of five for even less. Hal declines the other ‘bargain’ offers which include an ironing board which looks like its straight out of the 70’s, a 1999 S Club Calendar and a tatty well thumbed Christmas Single from Cliff Richard, available for just 19p. Woolworths failed to re-invent itself in the last ten years, and ultimately paid the price as its customers passed the entrance of their store on route to Wilkinsons and Pound Land, it is no wonder that the wonder of Woolies was wonder no more.
What must have hurt Woolworths even more was how the Wilkinson’s chain did not always move into the heart of the town centre, where Woolies was king. Wilkinson’s strategy appears to have been to take over the large old supermarket sites, abandoned in the 90’s when the likes of Tesco, Gateway, Safeway and Sainsbury moved out of town to newly built mega stores with big car parks. Woolies customers walked further to find Wilkinson’s and found them in the old run down 1970’s style precinct. The arrival of Wilkinson’s brought new life to the old shops that surrounded their store which had previously suffered from a lack of footfall when the likes of Sainsbury moved out years previous. Not only had Wilkinson’s successfully moved the customer, they also moved the centre of the high street.
But there is still a place for Woolworths on the high street and what Claire Robertson is doing in Dorchester is going to prove that, this new business will not fail. In interviews this entrepreneur stated that Woolworths of Dorchester had always been profitable and with this knowledge has set about turning a profit under the new brand, ‘Wellworths’. Wellworths (or ‘Wellies’ as it is already being called locally in Dorchester) is no small undertaking. Robertson sent her CV to the landlord, formed a company through a consortium, raised finance, secured the trading name ‘Wellworths’ and employed over twenty of her former colleagues and now the real challenge starts as she has to now fill 6500 square feet of store space with products that the people of the town actually want to buy, and failure to do this by Woolworths and their bizarre selection of goods was the reason why the company ultimately failed.
Wellworths of Dorchester will benefit from managing its own stock, making its own policies and trying out new ideas without clearance from the board of Directors, and gone too are the days of a delivery of ‘life-like animals’ as stock. Wellworths is in the fortunate position of being first at grabbing the headlines since the close of this iconic chain and in being that they will become a pilgrimage for reminiscing former Woolworth customers and employees spanning the last 99 years as they holiday to the south coast for years to come, and on top of the local customers, these people will buy from things there, it is even safe to sell tat, people will buy it.
The most exciting part of setting up a new business is not having to action the very out of touch decisions and initiatives that out of touch senior people that are paid far too much money think is right for a business they don’t actually understand. I had previously worked for an organisation that had grown in twenty years into a healthy and profitable venture which had grown to achieve an internationally respected reputation. In 2006 a management change at the most senior level at the parent University saw a slow and painful process which ultimately resulted in what one professor spent his life building, another professor spent two years pulling apart. I wrote about it at the time I was made redundant and each time I’ve re-read what I’d written I’ve taken some of the anger out of it. At the time a headteacher from a school I worked with in New Zealand on hearing the news wrote to me and said…
“Change is good for us but we don’t usually like the thought. Remember the old sayin…..When the winds of change blow, some build walls while others build windmills.” I can just see those windmills springing up everywhere.”
And they did.
Two years on and I’m now sitting at the same furniture I sat at when employed by my previous employer, I’m on the same chair, using the some of the same equipment and answering the very same telephone number. Project partners and clients followed us as a team of those made redundant joined together to form a company, under a new brand. Like Claire Robertson, we believed that things did not have to come to an end, and two years later we’re thriving, employing new people and working on high profile new business which involves designing new learning spaces, building new software, visioning change and helping people to make their big idea happen. Our clients include the BBC, NHS, Macmillan Cancer Relief, Government departments, local authorities, schools, colleges and universities nationwide. The key to our success so far has been in believing in ourselves, taking risks and not forgetting where we came from. Ultimately, this is one thing we have in common with Woolworths. Woolies employed excellent staff at store level, trained them well and ultimately retained them and the fact that the majority of the Dorchester staff have returned to the fold under a new brand is testiment to their work ethos. The way the Woolworths team worked together to close their business down and action the administrators requirements was worlds apart in comparison to the chaos over at MFI.
There was some talk in a revival of the name of the organisation I used to work with as part of a merger of retained staff from various department closures, the apparent decision was quite rightly not to use the old name because former clients and partners knew it was not the same people standing behind the brand, and this too is the same with Woolies, it was the people in each branch which made each store the success it was, even as it closed.
News has also broken about Tony Page, Andy Latham and Steve Jebson, three former Woolworths bosses who failed to secure the ‘Woolworths’ brand name but still plan to relaunch fifty of the former profitable stores in their original premises under a similar name. Again, another great sign of the highstreet fighting back, and an opportunity already for the Dorchester consortium to earn money from franchising the ‘Wellworths’ brand to them. Maybe Page and his team will call their stores ‘Wallworths’ or ‘Willworths, although ‘Wallys’ and ‘Willys’ don’t have the same ring to them as Wellworths ‘Wellies’. I wonder if the team at Shop Direct have seen the opportunity here to add some substance to their totally online business by offering Tony Page and his team a deal to use the old ‘Woolworths’ brand; it makes sense for the two companies to share the name and strike a deal which means that they don’t enter each others markets, one concentrates on stores, the other deals online.
I’m not convinced Woolworths online will be a successful business. I’m nervous of totally online traders with the exception of Amazon and Play.com who have build their businesses as the internet evolved, learning valuable lessons along the way, and have become brilliant at what they do. As British consumers we’re well known for liking to complain and because Amazon and Play.com’s business model is so good they rarely make a mistake, this is why we use them, this is why they are so successful. When it comes to the likes of other stores online I’ll buy from them if they also have a brick and mortar presence which I can walk into, faulty product in hand, and cause a fuss.
The new Woolworths wont have the old people, and won’t have any bricks and mortar, so why would I shop there? We all know at least one company that we’ve had a bad experience with and will avoid like the plague, joining the list for me alongside Thomas Cook, HSBC, Pontin’s and Texaco is British Gas. I’m in dispute with British Gas over an electricity bill which is so wrong I’ve had to involve a solicitor. Had British Gas had a shop on the high street which I could have walked into, sat down and gone through the details face to face, rather than spend hours being passed through, fobbed off, and cut off by a undermanned centralised customer service department which lacks the ability for me to point at various pieces of factual paper, then I don’t think this situation would have got legal. Unfortunately, like the rest of the utility companies, British Gas moved out of the high street, and became a challenge to approach, I’m hoping the new Woolworths online will get this right, even as I write this their holding website has gone down. Not all businesses need bricks and mortar to do well online, the rise of Wink online bingo has emerged and fearlessly taken on an established market by appealing to the younger audience, a clever and effective strategy, so totally online can work, I’m amazed that the online retailers are not offering their customers free bingo sessions as loyalty rewards in the same way bricks and mortar businesses give away loyalty points.
We British love a comeback, and how it is done is so important, take Dirty Den for example, some things are just best left dead and buried. When MFI tried to relaunch itself with the slogon “we’ve changed, have you?” and subsequently went bust I was among the crowds of people who queued up and battled to get a bargain. There was no real sorrow for the chain which had tried so hard to reinvent itself so many times and struggled to shake off its poor reputation, people have long memories, even though I’ve travelled in countless comfortable Skoda taxi’s, I’d never buy one. My parents had always struggled with MFI furniture purchases as I grew up, with bits missing and poorly finished goods I’d automatically discounted them when buying furniture myself. It is only now, after spending a lot of money on stock purchased from the administrators that I can conclude that it is very good stuff and I’d buy more, but I can’t, they are bust. On the last day of MFI in Chelmsford I was helped by, and also helped complete strangers load vans, carry out purchases and dismantle wardrobes, there is something about the British banding together to help each other out when stripping a failing business of its remaining assets. There is also something very British about getting behind a good business, even so much to deserve a page on Wikipedia.
And how fitting for radio personality Chris Evans a comeback success story in his own right volunteering to open the new Dorchester store. Chris has successfully reinvented himself from being the loud controversial breakfast presenter, late night tv host, and Radio 1 DJ of the 90’s to become the calm and easy listening presenter who winds down the aging Radio 2 audience on their way home from work. Who would have predicted Terry Wogan and Chris Evans on the same frequency ten years ago? Chris successfully did what what Wellworths is going to go on and do, reinvent itself to meet the needs of todays market. The fact that Chris has offered to bring his own scissors and tape is a telling sign of how difficult it is to buy things on the British high street at the moment, lets hope there is a Wilkinson’s on route the day he opens the shop.
Last year I was stung with a £75 data charge for using my iPhone in Switzerland to navigate out of a mountain area (via Google Maps). Shocked at the charge, I phoned o2 and moaned, and then promised myself not to use data downloads again when abroad.
While in France last week I had to use my iPhone to download email and send a quick message, or let someone down. I used the phone for about five minutes and was charged over £11 for that short period:
Data charges in Europe are crazy, o2 please lower your rates; in comparison to the phone call charge (on the bill) they are not fair.
First blog of the year and I’m writing about the BETT show (Olympia; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday this week)!
Cleveratom (my company) will be at the show again this year, this time we’re partnering with City College Norwich and their excellent ‘RUGroom’ project (for students with Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of Autism)), which we are involved with quite heavily embedding technology.
Students with AS will be on hand to talk about why RUGroom has just won a Beacon Award for Widening Participation.
Cleveratom are on stand U130, City College are on adjoining stand U120.
As usual we’ve a strict ‘no pressure sales policy’ and welcome visitors for chat about:
We’ll shout you a coffee.
Click here to go to the Cleveratom Press Releases page to see our three press releases.
I travelled up to London on Sunday night to meet the guys from the RUGroom project at City College Norwich in preparation for Professor Stephen Heppell’s ‘Be Very Afraid’ on Monday.
The students from RUGroom were showing off their creativity in the form of GeoArt!
Here is some GeoArt one of the groups made while at the event!:
Wow! What an event! I’ve written about it on our digital creativity website! To read what I wrote, click this link….
I find it amazing that National Express have chosen to promote their new dot2dot shuttle bus service (in their in train magazine) by having a pop at the overcrowded London tube.
I find the overcrowded mainline trains run by National Express could really do with more carriages (see pictures) before they start pointing an ‘overcrowding’ finger at another operator to which they plan to compete with.
I really dislike National Express, does it show?
Chelmsford Borough Council: Victor says put all your staff up in the Boreham ‘Premier Inn’ hotel on a Sunday night. Get all staff to drive as far as Tesco Springfield Road at 8:30am on the Monday morning from the hotel, taking notes along the way.
Since 1997 (the past eleven years) I’ve had to ‘rush hour commute’ from Witham to Chelmsford in order to get to University (1997 - 2000), first job (2000 - 2006) my own company (2007- now).
Because of the nature of my business I have to drive, and need a car available during my day in order to get to clients, schools, etc… I also car share with my fiancée (Justina) who also works in Chelmsford, driving is the most cost effective way to get to work.
We start our journey from close to point ‘A’ and get to point ‘B’ usually very easily (usually no more than 15 minutes). Its getting from point ‘B’ (the end of Springfield Road in Chelmsford) to point ‘C’ (my office car park) where it all goes horribly wrong, and has done for the past eleven years (except when schools are on holiday!)
When we hit the end of Springfield Road (see the red x below) it can take up to (and over) half an hour to drive half a mile to ‘B’ where I work and Justina walks to ‘A’.
Springfield Road is one of the main roads into the town, a narrow road which can longer cope with the volume of vehicles using it. Traffic joins the road from side streets, busy junctions (with traffic lights) and is slowed further by stupidity, such as a refuge collection lorry picking up bins during rush hour.
I’ve been timing the route from the X point using the stopwatch feature on my phone. Here is the 32 minute nightmare journey time getting from ‘X’ to ‘B’ today…
I put it to Chelmsford Borough Council that they need to do something to improve access to Chelmsford for people coming from the Colchester bound direction of the A12, it is quite simply a joke.
I’m not sure how things have improved in the past eleven years for people coming from the London bound direction but I’ve noticed how increased traffic volume has just made things get worse and worse in the past few years.
Something needs to be done.
Have you tried Chelmsford Park & Ride?
Why don’t Justina and yourself take the train each day?
But you don’t need to pay a day rate you could get a rail season ticket for less!
Suggestions:
UPDATE!
At 8:15am (till 9am) on Tuesday 16 October 2008 Ray Clark, presenter of the BBC Essex Breakfast Show reported on Justina and my journey to Chelmsford from Witham after reading this blog post.
Thanks to Hal MacLean for this recording of the show:
Matthew Eaves on the BBC Essex Radio Breakfast Show with Ray Clark : Play Now | Play in Popup | Download