Retail Leadership

Engaged Employees Keep Retailers In A Leadership Position

Many large and impersonal retailers believe that a paycheck is all employees expect from their jobs.
Studies demonstrate time and again that employees who feel a connection to the organization will
rise to the challenges we face in tougher times. Smaller retailers can create an engaged work environment where employees feel a greater sense of belonging and commitment to the company and their peers.

This sense of commitment motivates employees to go the extra mile to keep retailers prospering even
when their competitors lose market share. How can we earn top loyalty from our employees? It goes far beyond what we pay them. Consider these best practices to create an engaged environment for your team:

Make employees part of the decision process. Many decisions within the organization may be positively
influenced with meaningful feedback from your team on the sales floor. Their interaction on a day to day basis with customers offers the best source of information in regards to what customers want from your organization.

Solicit opinions and feedback on issues that directly affect employees and their job parameters. Let them feel ownership to decisions made about their schedules, benefits, work shifts etc.

Good work should be recognized and praised. All companies that have a culture of connected employees
formally reward those that excel at their jobs.

Encourage a culture of recognition amongst peers. Create a co-supportive environment where employees
can come forward to praise their own coworkers.

Make sure that decisions made within the organization are promptly shared with the employees. Engaged employees should always be the first to know what is evolving in the company. Often, employees hear from outside sources or read developments in the newspaper about their company and feel demoralized that they weren’t informed by their corporate leaders.

Develop well defined career paths for employees from entry level through to senior management. Offer
personal mentoring to all employees on training, personal growth and career timelines.

Offer frequent job rotation schedules whenever possible. This is one of the best strategies to build job enrichment and loyalty. Employees who are exposed to all duties within their level of the company see the big picture and feel a high degree of ownership and engagement.

Continually offer increased responsibility to employees who demonstrate initiative and wish to learn more
about the business.

Offer a feedback program where employees can voice their opinions and concerns and receive formal feedback of the outcomes.

Encourage employees to submit business improvement ideas and reward employees who have offered concepts that were successfully implemented.

Offer profit sharing to employees so that they see a personal link to their prosperity and the company’s
growth.

Take Action Today:

1) Review these strategies and implement as many of them that your company can support.

2) Inform employees through formal meetings of your programs and encourage their participation.

3) Make your engaged work environment and its features part of new employee orientation.

 Get The Best Employees For Your Store By Following These Golden Rules

One retailer I recently spoke to lamented about how hard it was to find the right candidate to hire. Lots of applicants, nobody with that “spark” they were looking for. Smaller retailers want someone who is mature, intelligent, enthusiastic and with a spirit of service.

Take Action Today:

1) Before you put the Help Wanted sign in the window, make a written list of the qualities you seek in a potential candidate based on the above criteria. This is your basis for conducting one or more employment interviews and does not replace your formal job interview process. It will enhance your decision making methodology.

2) Keep an open mind to hiring an excellent applicant even if you do not have a position open. If your wage budget can accommodate them, consider bring them on part time and evaluating what productivity they can offer your store. A good candidate who produces extra sales will quickly pay for the added wage expense.

3) Build your sales team through evaluation, training and promotion of part time employees who started with you by demonstrating the special qualities in this article.

retail, retailer, leadership, operations, sales, merchandise, global trends, global issues, customers, consumers, merchandise, selection, location, traffic. employees, hiring

Retailers Looking For Potential Locations Face New Rules

Customer Travel Habits Have Changed and Affect Where You Should Locate

Today, consumer buying behavior has changed. It’s largely driven by the return of time-starved families and a more prudent approach to travel or commuting. High fuel costs have forced consumers to adopt new money saving strategies that strongly influence where they’ll shop:

1) Many consumers will now limit shopping between where they live and where they work. They’ll do the majority of their shopping on the way home to break up the commute, and thus will refrain from taking large detours. If your shop or considered location is situated on main commuter routes, you’ll capture solid traffic based on this new buying pattern.

2) The high cost of parking, particularly in larger municipalities has turned off many consumers. Often, shopping where free parking is offered becomes the sole factor in their buying behavior and the locations they select to shop in.

3) Elements as simple as barriers to access can become the deciding factor in selecting a shopping location. Difficult to navigate parking lots, left hand turns at busy intersections and even the typical distance a customer needs to walk to the doors will affect which locations they’ll shop at.

4) Stores located near noisy freeways, railroad tracks or run down neighborhoods also become deterrents to shoppers. If you decide to locate a store around these elements, you may face traffic obstacles from the first day. Customers that need to cross railroad tracks to get to your store who get stuck waiting for a crossing train may abandon your store as a shopping option in the future.

5) Many corner locations offer access from multiple directions, great visibility and easy street parking. Consider a corner storefront if you are considering a street location.

6) Time starved customers today prefer to shop at multiple locations located in proximity to one another. This cuts down on travel time and fuel costs. In fact, today’s consumers expect your store to be located near your competition so they can comparison shop efficiently as well.

7) Stores situated on cottage bound routes are typically strong locations. Consumers will often buy on the way to the cottage or vacation destination but are not inclined to buy on the return trip. Being on the right side of the road is critical for capturing this valuable traffic.

Today’s price-driven consumer needs to accomplish their needs-based buying trips within a minimum amount of time and fuel costs. Your existing and future locations must support these new buying patterns. The notion of destination shopping for today’s consumer is becoming a dwindling concept.

Take Action Today:

1) Conduct an Audit of your existing or future locations and understand how they fit into these new elements of buying.

2) Consider solutions to overcome access obstacles in existing locations. Mall merchants can pool resources to hire a police officer to help direct customers into busy entrances for example.

3) Determine if you have captive commuter traffic and target your marketing to this group.

retail, retailer, leadership, operations, sales, merchandise, global trends, global issues
customers, consumers, merchandise, selection, location, traffic

Customers Offer Loyalty To Retailers They Are Connected To

Customer Loyalty continues to become more and more elusive to retailers. Large big box retailers cultivate loyalty through meeting the needs of budget minded consumers based on price points and selection. Service has taken a back seat to price in the big box model. Not surprisingly, customers never feel really connected to these faceless retailers and a cheaper price at a competitor around the corner instantly transfers these customers’ “loyalty” to another retailer. Their loyalty is superficial and really only loyal to the dollar and not the retailer over the long term.

Today, our easily distracted customers will be genuinely loyal to retailers they feel connected to. Make these new rules of engagement part of your customer service model and your team will build long term loyal relationships in a modern market that has largely become indifferent and impersonal to the customer:

1) Schedule staff to cover your sales floor and enable them to interact face to face with the customers on every visit. This is a dramatic contrast to many retailers who now have one employee for every 10,000 square feet for sale floor area. Most customers in those stores expect to fend for themselves and may never even see a store employee during their entire visit to the store, let alone receive some old fashioned customer service.

2) Use technology to make your organization available 24/7. Even the smallest retailer must have a website and simple email channels that enable customers to contact you with questions and concerns. Make sure someone gets back to customers within a day and avoid over-automated phone systems that make it difficult for customers to talk to a store employee, even during business hours.

3) Survey customers and offer the top three venues of communication they prefer. You may find that some customers still prefer to write a letter and drop it in the mail, or even fax requests to you. Whatever you discover, let your customer base tell you what methods they prefer and then offer it. Older customers or those that are less technically oriented may be unable to or dislike using email to communicate with your store, and expect a direct phone line to a real person on the other end.

4) Respond to customers in a personalized manner. Customers will not be loyal to customers who respond with cookie cutter and “canned” responses. Personal responses should always be handled by a store employee who offers their name in case the customer has further questions or concerns. A customer will always feel more connected when they receive a response from a person with a name as opposed to “The Sales Team” or the “Customer Service Response Unit”.

5) Study and listen to what customers ask for and see if patterns are emerging. If many customers contact you about your open store hours (i.e. only open 9 to 12 on Saturdays and closed Sundays), you may want to change them to meet the needs of the customers and let them know of the change. An email or letter to a customer advising them that based on their concerns as well as other customers, you’ve now extended Saturday hours to 5 PM for example will impress them and show them that you are listening to them. These customers will feel connected and their loyalty will be long term in contrast to the faceless competitors.

Follow the new rules of engagement with your customers and you’ll make them feel more like partners than customers. Their hard-earned loyalty will be yours as long as they feel connected.

Take Action Today:

1) Make the new rules of engagement part of your customer service model.

2) Examine how you communicate and respond to customers and ensure that your systems cater to the specific needs of your customer base.

3) Get back to personalized communication with customers and make them connect with real employees in your store.

4) Continually survey your customers and engage meaningful dialogue to understand what changes they expect if they are to stay connected and loyal to your organization.

retail, retailer, leadership, operations, sales, global trends, global issues
customers, consumers, merchandise, service. engagement, communication

Retail Consumers Love Buying Local Goods For All The Best Reasons

In earlier articles I have elaborated on the need to re-invent and tweak your brand in the new economy. Consumers with less cash at hand are more frugal and calculating with their purchases. With a more conservative outlook, families also focus on the environment and favor more environmentally friendly products. Consumers will certainly buy products made in America or Canada or whatever their home country is as a matter of sovereignty.

Purchasing products including food from your own country has now evolved to a new level: Buying Local. Consumers feel a connection with foods or other products that have been produced in proximity of their community. There’s also the added benefit that the cost of transporting the goods to market is minimal. Think of the energy consumed to bring some food from South America to your supermarket compared to a 35 mile trip from a local farm outside of town.

Does your store feature goods from foreign countries?  Cheap labor countries like China, India and The Philippines have flooded our stores with cheap mass produced products. It’s agreed that in this price driven economy that consumers will buy these items to fit their budgets, however most are prepared to spend a little more for locally produced goods. It makes them feel good too!

Even a small percentage of your product offering that features local goods reinvents your brand in the eyes of the consumer. Local goods can be featured near the front of the store and on sale with prominent signs. You may also have an opportunity to have a local supplier do some in store promotions and demonstrations for your customers. Solid long term loyalty can be created when customers not only like your local products but have also met the creators of the goods personally in your store.

Your whole store doesn’t need to be overhauled to enhance your brand. Start with a handful of selected local products and promote them for their quality, price and “made at home” features. Your customers will appreciate how your store now caters to this hot new trend.

Take Action Today:

1) Consider local goods for your store. Common categories for local goods include foods, kitchen items, wood products, hard goods and specialty clothing.

2) Review possibilities with all your employees. They may know of specific suppliers in town or near your community that can offer competitively priced home spun merchandise.

3) Aggressively promote your hand picked local goods in your store and in local advertising. Enhance your brand and meet the new needs of environmentally concerned familes.

retail, retailer, leadership, operations, sales, merchandise, competition,
clientele, customers, relationships, technology. environment, made at home, local

Do Some Legwork And Start A Co-Op At No Cost

Wikipedia defines a Retailer Co-Operative as:

“A retailer’s co-operative (known as a secondary or marketing co-operative in some countries) is an organization which employs economy of scale on behalf of its members to get discounts from manufacturers and to pool marketing. It is common for locally-owned grocery stores, hardware stores and pharmacies.  In this case the members of the cooperative are businesses rather than individuals.”

Retail Co-Operatives were organized to enable smaller retailers to enjoy the benefits of clout and buying power only enjoyed by their large competitors.  Some very large co-operatives evolved at the turn of the last century but as many got larger, administrative and operating costs increased dramatically. Members did not need to put any effort into running the co-op. They simply paid ever increasing membership fees and all the issues were taken care of. Today, many co-operatives fizzled out because these membership turn key operations priced themselves out of the market. Members no longer saw the perceived value of staying with them based on escalating membership fees.

In these challenging times, you can organize a retail co-operative in the way they were meant to be. Membership fees are minimal because everyone in the co-op volunteers their time and legwork for various initiatives and thus keeps costs down. A co-operative can involve all the retailers in a small town, all the retailers on main street or in a strip mall with the landlord’s permission. In large towns, all the retailers in a market area or neighborhood can make a very effective co-op organization.

They can work well, if small retailers chip in and volunteer their time to make it work at minimal cost with maximum benefits. Retail Co-ops work best when they focus economy of scale arrangements with other smaller suppliers. Approaching the small local newspaper or office supply warehouse with a proposal for a co-op discount can give them new business and be a great opportunity for them as well.

What can members volunteer for? A whole array of initiatives that can boost business for you and your members:

Your store after hours as a meeting place for members to discuss issues and organize initiatives.

Simple refreshments for the members at a meeting.

Organizing a co-operative advertising initiative for the members in the local paper.

Organizing a co-operative discount for business and vehicle insurance

Organizing a co-operative for medical benefits

Organizing two semi annual sidewalk sales

Organizing a co-operative rate for courier or transportation services

Clearly, there are dozens of opportunities where members of the co-op can save 5 to 20% off of business costs by using the economy of scale to their advantage and making commitments as a group for suppliers to gain business in a reciprocal manner. These small co-ops work great and save money as long as everyone pitches in and does their part to make it work without the crippling overhead that many large co-ops face until their unfortunate demise.

Does a few hours a month of your time in exchange to saving hundreds or thousands of dollars a year in operating costs appeal to you? Start a volunteer based retail co-op today!

Belonging to a co-op also creates a co-supportive atmosphere and alliance where the meeting of the minds not only makes economic sense, but can also be a great venue for problem solving and brain storming.

Take Action Today:

1) Make a list of non-competing retailers who you believe would benefit from belonging to a volunteer retail co-op.

2) Ask your employees who they may think should be approached. Determine which of your employees could also be effective volunteers in the co-op.

3) Approach your target list of retailers and explain that members will benefit from the co-op but need to volunteer a few hours a month to spearhead and develop various initiatives agreed to by the members.

4) Consider a membership fee for cost of meetings, refreshments, photocopying etc, but keep it nominal.

5) Schedule your first meeting in your store and get started!

retail, retailer, leadership, operations, sales, employees,
overhead, co-ops, co-operative, expenses, cost reductions

Retail Environments That Encourage Employees To Take Risks Build Leadership

In previous articles, I’ve predicted that 2010 will continue to be a challenging year for the small retailer. Those that will survive and prosper through this tough period will capitalize on all their resources at hand. Clearly, the collective minds and actions of the entire team is the greatest resource a small retailer can tap into. I’ve discussed at length how to encourage ideas and recommendations from your entire sales team that have an intimate understanding of what transpires on the sales floor.

Retailers can develop leadership skills within their people by encouraging them to develop ideas, and execute them in an effort to accomplish a specific goal. These can include building top line sales, increasing clientele, improving margin, merchandising strategies and much more. Senior employees can also be encouraged to hire new employees and develop their hiring skills.

You can create an environment that encourages employees to not only conceive ideas but implement them. Employees that offer new ideas and make them a reality must also need to take responsibility for their outcome. Working in this framework makes employees think of the consequences of success as well as failure. If they must take responsibility for their ideas, they’ll be more calculating and analytical before they implement them. Of course this is a good practice, however as a manager, calculated risks that fail should be analyzed objectively as a learning experience. The idea may need to be refined, or perhaps it’s time to try something else. In all cases, employees who take risks and fail should not be raked over the coals or punished for trying to improve the business. In fact, statistically those that stretch their ideas and abilities and take calculated risks will fail about one third of the time. If they succeed twice as often as they fail, I think those are pretty great odds at overall improvement and their development.

To start this powerful process, you may want to create the framework for ongoing improvement through employee generated concepts. You can mandate them to create ideas around merchandising, weekend sales promotions or clientele building. You can give them challenges as specific as how to build add-on sales.

As an added benefit, empowering your employees to influence the evolution of your store builds ownership and loyalty and makes your team much more effective than any of your competitors.

Tap into the skills and knowledge of your whole team to prosper in 2010!

Take Action Today:

1) Communicate to employees that you encourage their ideas and will empower them to implement their business improvement concepts.

2) Advise them that they must take responsibility for their ideas and should think about consequences of both success and failure.

3) Encourage them to discuss potential ideas with their peers or manager to ensure that all angles are considered before implementation.

4) Suggest specific areas to get them started. Avoid giving them vague mandates.

5) Be objective when ideas fail. Learn and move on. Reward successes event the small ones.

6) Keep the team experimenting!

retail, retailer, leadership, operations, sales, merchandise, finances, recession, customers, employees, economy, sales, promotions, trends, experimentation, teams, improvement, clientele

Achieve Market Leadership With This Often Overlooked Asset

The final push is on for Christmas. Every astute retailer has everyone on the sales floor and is focused on customer service, closing sales and building clientele as traffic levels increase. A recent consumer survey in Canada indicated that 47% of those customers surveyed planned on spending the same or less money on gifts compared to last year and 18% do not plan on holiday shopping at all.

Those are dismal findings, if we are to believe them. Not surprisingly, this Christmas season will be the toughest in decades and in earlier articles, I have predicted that various global forces will make 2010 an even more challenging year.

Smaller retailers who are adamant about getting through this recession have hopefully followed many of my recommended strategies and tactics in past articles, but is there more you can be doing? Sometimes they say that knowing the right question is half the battle of finding a solution. Most retailers however place the burden on themselves to come up with all the creative answers in driving the business, without tapping into their most powerful asset: Their employees!

There are few individuals better than your own employees who can offer insight into what customers want, what can be improved and how to the store can be operated in order to capture market leadership. Your sales employees who interact with customers day in and day out can be a priceless source of information and opinion when it comes to business improvements. Sadly less than one in ten retail entrepreneurs have a structured or at least ongoing method of tapping into the knowledge of their sales team.

Above and beyond garnering valuable business information, employees who work for a retail organization that continually cares what they think and values their opinion feel a much higher  level of loyalty and ownership to the company. Retailers who involve their employees in the evaluation and decision making process win by gaining a multitude of ideas, opinions and perspectives that may not be apparent to others in the organization. Employees win by being part of the company’s mission and destiny and appreciate the fact that the company values their thoughts and recommendations.

Your company may not adopt all of the ideas that employees offer, however chances are a high percentage of them can make your operation more effective based on their practical, real-life experiences on the sales floor.

Take Action Today:

1) Create a formal and informal method that will empower employees to share their ideas and opinion in regards to ongoing business improvement. Always be approachable when ideas are offered informally, and enable employees to offer suggestions through typical suggestion boxes and weekly planning meetings.

2) Always share suggestions put forth by an employee with everyone in the company and communicate the outcome of the issue. Good ideas that are adopted should be followed by credit and praise for the employee and ideas that are rejected or deferred should be handled tactfully.

3) Encourage employees to continue to suggest business improvements, even if their latest ideas were not adopted.

4) In planning meetings, you may get valuable answers from sales employees if you ask specific questions. These may involve your price strategy, selection, brand, staff levels, service levels etc.

5) Involve non-sales support staff in planning meetings. They may be able to offer ways to improve policies and procedures as well.

retail, retailer, leadership, operations, sales, merchandise, finances, recession, customers, employees,
economy, stock market, sales, promotions, discounts, loyalty, holidays

The Current Economic Recovery May Be Superficial and Temporary

We’re currently seeing elements of economic recovery but how solid is the road back to prosperity? Chairman Bernacke at the Federal Reserve recently stated that we appear to be climbing out of the recession but do not expect substantial increases in job creation. In Canada, 40,000 jobs were lost in the last quarter in spite of the so called recovery. If we look at the economic recovery closely we see that its largely interpreted through the current stock market positions. The TSX and Dow Jones have clawed their way up to an impressive 11,000 and 10,000 points level and many people see this as an opportunity to jump back into the market with the remaining funds they salvaged from the 2008 downturn.

Large and small retailers alike must understand what is going on and prepare for 12 more months of a truly weak economy. Retailers must not be lulled into a sense of security because of this short term market recovery. There are other forces at play that may bring the economy to a crippling halt in 2010, and retailers who are prepared for this event can get though this and get back on track.

If the stock market has passed the 10,000 point, shouldn’t we be celebrating and putting the economic woes behind us? Firstly, I believe that this “recovery” is artificial and may be short lived. This is because stock prices have been going up because of short term earnings. If you examine just about every company on the stock exchange revenues are dropping yet earnings are up, hence increases in stock value. This is because in spite of dropping revenues, massive layoffs of employees in 2008 has created a short term benefit in lowering operating costs. Companies have reduced their employees to the bare minimum, however as revenues continue to drop the options that remain are either bankruptcy or a significant drop in earnings. With an unemployment rate of 10% in the USA, that is more like 15% in reality, people just won’t be buying anything in the near future. The stock market will then start its sure decline back down to perhaps half of its current value or less.

When the stock market drops combined with a 15% unemployment rate, we’ll be back in the economic abyss. There are other forces in play that will surface in 2010. Similar to the sub prime mortgage meltdown that occurred in 2007-2008, massive amounts of conventional mortgages are coming due. Although these are not sub prime mortgages, about a sixth of them are high risk low equity ones that will have the same effect as the sub prime mortgage fiasco. The number of high risk mortgages out there is about equal to the total of sub prime mortgages that collapsed last time.

However the bottom line though all of this remains as the chronically high unemployment rate. Consumerism drives the economy and retail. People without employment do not spend.

The retailers who understand what is going to happen, and prepare for it now will be able to survive this economic storm. There is a road to prosperity coming again, however the small retailer must get ready for one more very challenging phase in our economic recovery.

Lastly, based on the timelines of all these forces, I suspect that this will start early summer 2010.

Take Action Today:

1) Do your own research NOW and decide whether the upcoming economic downturn I speak about will happen and if it will affect your retail operation.

2) Plan to enter 2010 in as strong a financial position as possible. Defer any major purchases or renovations.

3) Price will be more important than ever in 2010 to the consumer. Continue to lower price points in your store and drive the price value brand statement.

retail, retailer, leadership, operations, sales, merchandise, finances, recession
economy, stock market

I work for a non profit retail association in Western Canada called Shelfspace, we used to be Retail Alberta and Retail BC but merged and became known as the entity Shelfspace. I have only been with the association 14 months and in that time we have lost a large portion of our membership (as have many other associations). Historically retail associations use the combined power of their membership to secure discounts on products and services that the majority of them need to run their business (insurance and merchant services would be two key components). Associations also advocate to government on issues that affect membership, anything that affects profitability or creates a barrier to business is usually high on the agenda, right now for instance the HST is a big issue. Information on the industry and creating a community for the industry are also important pillars of what associations do.

I know what we do is important; however talking to members on a day to day basis makes me realize that most of them don’t. Most of them see us as a cost saving entity for their business and nothing else. Yet we can be so  much more and indeed want to do so much more for them. There are many reasons we are having issues.

Market commoditization; a lot of our retail cost saving programs are undermined by a competitive market, I like this to Unions, if associations did not exist the market would not be as competitive in fighting for retail dollars. Ergo; if associations dissappear the market is only regulated by itself which is never a good thing when it comes to pricing.

Competition; As a retail specific entity we are in a crowded marketplace, we compete with chambers of commerce, boards of trade, Business improvement associations and national retail associations. National associations tend to have large sales forces, a stronger voice in the media and the ability to secure better discounts for their members. Local chambers of commerce and boards of trade tend to have great events, secure similar discounts to us but with the added value of being part of a community that only focuses on its regional area.

Advocacy; retailers used to love associations going to bat for them, nowadays only our most engaged members are getting involved. Essentially most retailers do not see advocacy as a reason to purchase membership. Again; this is troubling to me as we represent the voice of our members, if we do not exist they don’t have a voice.

It is not all doom and gloom but the signs are there that associations need to change their ways to keep their membership engaged and seeing value. Shelfspace is trying to take a step in a different direction for that purpose. Our history as an association is approximately 100 years old. We went from beinmg the Retail Merchants Association of Canada, to the RMA of British Columbia, to Retail BC and now with our merger we are Shelfspace (18 days old!).

What makes us different? Well our name for one thing, Shelfspace connotes a physical and metaphysical place in the retail realm. It is retailers most valuable real estate and is a focal point for the customers where their products come alive. A name is only as good as the product behind it though.

When we rebranded we built a new website, we looked at increasing content as resource to become a content provider for the retail industry on a large scale, we are not as content heavy as we would like to be but we are getting there.

Education; we have set up training courses specifically for the retail industry, the next step is get them online so that our members or their employees can educate themselves at their convenience. Cost efficient and built for the basic wage employee to manager. How many courses are out there specifically for retail?

Cost saving programs; while trying to keep the same products as our competitors to keep an even playing field, we have also introduced personal cost savers which can be used by employees and owners alike. These benefits don’t help the bottom line of the business but employees can also use them to receive discounts on various products and services. discounts on flights, cell phones, cable etc are available and are a good added perk for employers to use for their staff.

Community; As a Western Canadian society we struggle to touch our members due to the sheer geographical size of our area. In response to that we have created a virtual community for our members to interact with each other. The community will take time to grow but we are confident in this age of social media of becoming the epicenter for retail conversation.

Friends; we have also created a level of membership that allows people interested in retail or our association to be a part of our organization on limited basis for free. They receive industry news and can take part in surveys. Shelfspace is about being inclusive no matter what the level of engagement is. To me this is one of the more innovative steps we have taken as an organization.

I could go on and on but at this stage I think you get the gist! If you would like to view the site you can do here:

http://www.shelfspace.ca/

Any feedback would be great, my main question is what is your opinion on associations value to the retail community, how can we become something you want to be a part of?

Thanks for your time!

Gareth Holden

Program development and member care

Shelfspace