“Retail Is Dead.” The Specscart Story Shows How This Is Just An Exaggerated Clickbait.

The death of retail. The retail apocalypse.

If you are in the retail business, you must have come across these statements very often. But what if we told you that these are just false scare stories that only serve to frighten the industry.

If you are a product-based business looking to increase your brick-and-mortar stores’ presence, or an e-commerce business wanting to take your offerings to the public through retail stores too, you must not buy ‘the death of retail’ story.

There is no doubt that the pandemic and changing market dynamics require retail stores to remain agile, but since shopping is an experience and not just a transaction, retail stores will always remain relevant.

Contrary to what these deceptive stories point to, the Specscart story has something different to say. It shows why retail stores are not just relevant, but can also help your business thrive in modern times.

Read on to know how Specscart’s experience with retail stores has shattered the perception that retail is dying.

Starting Off With A Physical Store

Many product-based businesses in present times prefer to start as e-commerce, especially when there is a well-established online market for the product that they are offering. Some of the advantages that come along with this include a lean operating model, a low financial burden, and access to a large number of consumers.

In our case, we launched our website around 6 months after Specscart was founded. In 2017, we started operations with the opening of our inaugural store in Walkden. Getting to know the consumers initially through this store helped us in a big way.

We got the opportunity of face-to-face interaction with people at our Walkden store. By keeping our store setting on point and with the help of a dedicated team, we ensured that the store atmosphere was always welcoming and friendly. This helped us gauge the fine details of what people were looking for when buying glasses, and what we could do to rise above their expectations and provide the best retail experience ever.

Our sales targets were hit-and-miss initially, but what mattered most to us was the personal bond that we were able to build with the people who visited our stores. The Walkden community now recognised Specscart as their friendly neighbourhood store and we will forever be grateful for this.

Specscart Bury

The Walkden experience had made one thing crystal clear to us — retail stores had a very big role in our vision of changing the way people perceive glasses. We were loving our interactions with the people and wanted more of it. That’s when we upscaled our retail business by launching our second store at Bury in 2018.

Now, we were connecting with more people through our brick-and-mortar stores. What followed was increased brand awareness, overwhelming reviews, and stronger customer relationships. All this only motivated us to upscale further. However, before we could proceed, the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic had set in.

Standing Strong During The Pandemic

In business, we often talk about disruption. The COVID-19 pandemic did just that, especially for brick-and-mortar retail. Many businesses were caught off guard, some shaken to their core, some forced to shut down. The ‘death of retail’ talk had now got louder.

With social distancing guidelines in place, our retail stores didn’t function in full swing. The pandemic did pose challenges, just like it did for every business. However, we were able to sail through these tough times. But how?

Well, we had a flourishing website way before the pandemic arrived, and yes, the transactions made over our website is what helped us stay strong during the pandemic. But, you got to look deeper into this.

There are a plethora of online sites in the UK selling glasses, and clearly, there are multiple options for consumers. Among all these options, a large number of people still chose us.

Taking no credits away from the user-friendly online shopping experience that our customers have lauded us for, a sizable amount of credit also needs to go to the identity of Specscart as a friendly neighbourhood store, which has a crucial role in helping us get online customers.

The comparatively better growth achieved in this tumultuous phase doesn’t mean that we overlooked the lessons that the pandemic had for the retail industry. With online shopping witnessing an exponential rise, we still believed that it would never replace the retail experience. However, the pandemic had changed consumer expectations and there was a need to revamp our retail experience to meet these expectations. Once the situation normalised, we did just that. Read on to know how!

Accelerating Our Brick-and-mortar Presence

After the normalisation of the COVID-19 situation, physical shopping saw an uptick. With social distancing guidelines still in place, people came out in large numbers. It was clear that they were missing the shopping experience exclusively provided at a physical store. And we knew that we could not disappoint them.

Towards the end of 2021, we shifted our inaugural Walkden store to a four times larger retail space in the same shopping complex, and a few months later — in early 2022 — we launched our third store in Urmston. The reason? To deliver exactly what consumers were expecting and to do it at a larger scale.

While the pandemic had forced some of the well-established retail players to exit the business, here we were — a small business — upscaling its retail presence at a pace that many would consider not well thought out. However, our decision was not only taken cautiously but also was a strategically sound one.

Brick-and-mortar retail had to adapt to the changes brought about by the pandemic, and the sooner we did it, the better it would be. The question that you must ask is — did things change? Yes, in a big way!

The store footfall — across all our three stores — shot up, and a positive word of mouth followed leading to a further increase in footfall, both in our physical stores and our website. And, this virtuous cycle has carried on till today.

To conclude, we would like to put it this way — retailers who understand the power of the shopping experience are set to thrive, provided they leverage their understanding of what people expect on entering their stores.