Last Thursday saw the end of one of our busiest periods in the year. The AGIdeas conference in Melbourne is a massive event, and an opportunity for us to create a pop up retail stall selling books and mags.
As always, it was incredibly well run, with an amazing line up of speakers. All participants we spoke to came away inspired and fired up for another year of creative pursuits.
However, this year our sales from the pop up stall were about half of what they were last year. We don’t really make any profit from our presence at the conference anyway – it really is an opportunity to get our brand name out there, however, the sales performance was a curiosity. When I mentioned this to a couple of people at the stall, they were interested in the reasons underpinning the lower sales, and at the time, I didn’t have a really coherent answer. A couple of factors now come to mind. It took us a few days to analyse all the sales, but we think we now have the reasons pegged:
- We didn’t have the same number of star new releases. Last year Wooden Toy, King Brown and Curvy, had all just released their latest issues. This year, we had in the new King Brown and T-World, but some of our other best sellers are still to arrive.
- Not as many of the speakers this year had books or magazines that sold in high volumes.
- This year was the 20th Year Anniversary of AGIdeas. As such, each participant was given a massive book which celebrated the 20 years of speakers. This thing weighed well over 3 kilos and required 2 hands to carry. Definitely not conducive to people buying books at the same time.
- A number of free back copies of various mags were given away to participants. This was done after discussion with us, so we were in the know, but people are less inclined to buy stuff after receiving a bunch of freebies as well.
- The volcano in Iceland delayed a shipment of some of our more interesting books, meaning they didn’t come out until later on the second day.
- The retail economy sucks. While the niche mags we specialise in may not have suffered, we hear from book retailers that book sales are well down. Also, most people have under-estimated just how much of an impact the government stimulus package had last year on maintaining retail sales.
All in all, we were again happy with our involvement with this fantastic event. Our main aim was to remind people that we exist. With no real budget for advertising, we see these sorts of events as an important extension of our store presence.
However, when you budget for sales of $X, and you end up doing around half of that, it doesn’t do a great amount for your cash flow forecasts. Looks like my kids are going to be serving behind the counter at a few stores in the coming weeks to make up the shortfall!
