Posts Tagged ‘recession’
The recession is pretty merciless when it comes to its victims – the only thing that’s inevitable is today’s economy is that if a business is not secure, it will go down. In the UK we’ve seen the demise of Woolworths and MFI in recent months. Now its the turn for diamond and pearl jewellery retailer Diamonds & Pearls. The jewellery retailer, based in Bedford, just north of London, have recently announced they’re going into administration. Many of their 91 retail shops in the UK could be faced with closing, threatening more than three hundred jobs.Global accountancy and management consultancy firm KPMG have been named as administrators. Myles Halley, and Richard Philpott, the administrators appointed by KPMG Restructuring, said they plan on selling up the business and are looking for a buyer.The administrators were pretty clear on the prospect of large scale branch closures as well as redundancies and job losses.
There goes yet another casualty of the 2009 economic crisis. However until very recently Diamonds & Pearls claimed they were “one of the UK’s fastest growing fashion retailers”. How do you go from that to bankruptcy? Is this inevitable for small to medium sized retailers and businesses during this recession? Not by a long shot. While Diamonds & Pearls’ physical stores may have been doing well in recent years, a quick look at their website, http://www.diamondspearls.co.uk – and you’ll quickly see the problem. Leave aside the poor web design and head straight for the ominous sounding Online Shop link – you get the message “Our Online Shop is currently under development, Please call back soon”! That says it all! I think we have a winner. By failing to support their business with a strong online presence and the ability to shop online, Diamonds & Pearls have really shot themselves in the foot. The one defining feature of consumer behaviour in the credit crunch is that people are going online to find the cheapest prices. This is especially important for small to medium businesses. If you are not at least holding your own in the online world, and relying purely on traditional methods of retail, its simply become a question of how long before you go bust, not whether you do. Even retail giants such as MFI, Woolworths and most recently Principles have suffered greatly. One of the key failings of all these retailers was that they didn’t have a strategy for online sales and marketing at a time when their competitors were staying afloat by these means. If I was looking for information on saltwater pearls, or browsing for freshwater pearl jewellery for a Mother’s Day gift, the first thing I’d do is search for those things. The same as hundreds of thousands of internet shoppers would also do – and they wouldnt have found Diamonds & Pearls this way
. Retailers beware: this is the clearest example you’ll get, and if you fail to heed this advice you could be next.