PROFILE: Doing Things Differently

Adnams has chosen to branch out from its traditional mail order niche and open retail shops, selling not only wine, but also niche kitchenware, in a series of out-of-the-way locations. Margaret Rand reports

How’s this for a conundrum? Adnams, with its strong mail-order business, is opening retail shops: eight last Christmas, five more this year and around 30 eventually. But these are not just wine shops; they’re wine and kitchenware shops, intended to attract the impulse buyer and the recreational shopper.
But – and it’s an important but – these shops are not on the high street. They’re in secondary sites, and deliberately so. You have to decide to go there. Yet the kitchenware on offer is not the sort of John Lewis selection that would make it a destination for those wanting gratin dishes in four different sizes; it’s much more gadget-oriented. Yes, there are some saucepans and some oven-to-tableware, but the focus is more on collapsible colanders that fold flat and go in a drawer, or exfoliating gloves for rubbing new potatoes (rather good, these, actually) and china jugs in the shape of sit-up-and-beg cows or pigs.

An individual approach
On the face of it it seems a little eccentric (“completely individual” is the phrase preferred by retail director Rupert Farquharson), and one’s tempted to think that they’ve either got it completely wrong or completely right. Results so far indicate the latter: the Southwold shop, which was the first to open, is now turning over around £2 million a year. (They don’t want to quote profits.) It’s about to be revamped, or rather rebuilt, in line with how the concept is developing. The kitchenware and the wines will be much more mixed up, as they are in the Woodbridge shop, and when they open in Saffron Walden there will be a café, with locally sourced produce. So let’s run through the reasoning: first of all, why shops?

Because, quite simply, they can’t do mail-order as well as The Wine Society (senior wine buyer Alastair Marshall cites the latter’s 20,000 delivery vans) or Laithwaites. They use third-party delivery and, says Farquharson, while they will remain a mail-order operation, “it will be marginal. Shops are the way forward”.
That’s the easy part. Why shops in this particular mould? And why in these particular towns?
These two questions are actually two aspects of the same question. The towns are chosen because they have something in common with Southwold: usually ravishingly pretty, they have an affluent local market and also attract weekending British tourists “of the right sort”, says Marshall. By that he means probably 40-plus (the usual profile of Adnams’ wine customers) and out for a spot of retail therapy. “We shied away from Cambridge,” he says. “It has foreign tourists, who can’t carry stuff back.” The kitchenware attracts impulse buyers and those with weekend houses, or indeed boats – the Woodbridge shop faces the yacht marina. In fact, in spite of losing the high-street ramekin browsers (many of the towns they are targeting already have excellent high-street cookshops), it’s the kitchenware that has driven sales at some of the shops thus far. At the Holkham shop “the kitchenware sales are often higher than the wine sales, not just in numbers of units but also in profitability,” says fine wine buyer Rob Chase. The Harleston shop, he says, is probably more wine-oriented, but when the Southwold shop opened they had expected people to come in for wine, and they came in for kitchenware. “It took time to get people to buy wine,” says Marshall.

All about Adnams
The town of Southwold, the mail-order operation, and the shops are knit together in a tight, triangular relationship. It’s mail-order customers who are attracted to the shops, and “our mail-order business is based on people who have holidayed in Southwold and have bought from Adnams ever since”, says Marshall. That’s been even more the case since they renovated The Crown. People view Adnams as their own personal discovery, says Chase – and that in turn is linked to a more general wish to live locally, buy locally and support local businesses. Adnams wants to capitalise on this by encouraging people to “come to Suffolk, stay Adnams, drink Adnams”. In my room at The Swan (Adnams-owned), for example, there was a copy of Simon Loftus’s Puligny Montrachet (1982) and a copy of his A Pike in the Basement (1987). “Lifestyle” isn’t a Chase sort of word, but he agrees that there might be an element of that.
What is slightly difficult to get to grips with is that they seem both to want browsers in the shops, and not to want them. The shops encourage casual shoppers – to offer an enjoyable experience is part of their raison d’être, and the gadgety bits of kitchenware are certainly impulse buys – yet when it comes to wine, what they really like is case sales, not bottle sales. That’s why secondary sites are preferable, with parking, and always with a restaurant or two nearby. This latter is crucial to making these off-high-street sites into destinations. Even so, says Marshall, “some people come to Southwold and never see [the shop]”.
Various parallels spring to mind, none of them exact. Fortnums is mixing up food, wine and gifts much more than it used to; and then, years ago, there were the Reynier Wine Libraries. Remember them? As well as being retail shops they served simple but good food, and you could buy wine at retail prices to drink with your bread and cheese. They were a fantastic concept, agrees Marshall; but his view is that they worked in places like Exeter, and off the high street, but not so well in, say, SW1. “We’re not going to SW1 – yet. Probably never.”

The way forward?
So where are they going? They are already in Southwold, Woodbridge, Harleston, Stamford and Holkham – the last was a risk, says Marshall, because while there’s a good restaurant there the place is underpopulated. But, he says, it has paid off. Saffron Walden, Holt and Hadleigh will probably be open by the time this piece appears. They’re looking at Richmond, having happened to find a good site. It’s a destination town, and Adnams will be on the road going out towards Richmond Park, near Caroline Charles and Farrow & Ball. The Cotswolds are a possibility, as is Cheltenham. Burnham Market is out, though, because you can’t park easily, and Sandringham is too out of the way. Not every pretty town will do. They’re also dipping a toe into internet shopping, with delivery from the shops within a given radius.
Having shops offers what Marshall, perhaps euphemistically, calls “different challenges”. It brings them into the wonderful world of discounting, for example. “We need to be able to react very quickly to that,” says Rupert. “We haven’t been quite as reactive as we could have been.” Not that they want to compete, you understand; just, well, be competitive. “Price is less important when you have a great experience,” says Rupert.
If the shops work as well as Adnams think they will, they’ll be ripe for copying. Which companies could imitate them? “James Nicholson of Northern Ireland,” they say instantly. “And Tanners has the same profile locally.” They’ll have to be prepared to shovel some money in: Adnams estimates that its 30 shops will mean a total of £6m invested. So far they’ve all been profitable in their first year – Woodbridge, says Marshall, was profitable within two months. But, emphasises Chase, the focus is not on quick profits. “We want a long-term, sustainable business.”
At the moment the concept seems to be constantly evolving, constantly being refined. Is it the way forward for wine retailing, or just one specific way forward? A lot of shops out there would like to know.

© db January 2008