It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. At Christmas, retail changes its priorities. Usually I spend a disproportionate amount of time handselling – this is where I leave my console and talk to customers about their needs, hopes and dreams. At Christmas all that goes out of the window. If I’ve done my job …
Continue reading “It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas”
Why run organised play? A lot of people seem confused by the concept of Organised play – why a store would do it, what they gain from it, what a brand gains from it, what a customer gains from it. Who does the grail serve and why should we care? Even before the global pandemic …
Continue reading “Who Does the Grail Serve – Organised Play and you”
It’s allocation time again. Pokemon 25th. Everyone wants it but there’s not enough to go around. If that sounds familiar, you probably work in games retail. Pokemon has been something of a holy grail for retailers these past couple of years. But the more we sell, the more people want to ram their snouts in …
Continue reading “Everyone wants to eat the cake (but nobody wants to bake it)”
It is the year 2001. My first GAMA Expo. The last day of the Trade Hall. If you’ve ever worked in larger industries, some of the sights and sounds of the hobby game industry’s premiere business to business event can seem a little strange. Grown men trying to strip stands of everything of value, their …
Buddy? I don’t need your money. More money is always better than no money. Sure. But you are the sort of guy who wanted Van Gogh to paint dogs playing pool. Who demanded Joyce put in punctuation and paragraphs before you would read Ulysses and then you still wouldn’t have. Here’s the thing. We call …
Today I’m going to take a minute to write about diversity. And why representation matters. I mean sure, a load of people already know this – because, well, you know… they are under-represented. And when that’s you, you notice things like that. And you really want them to change. And I want them to change …
Once, many years ago, my father and I encountered a man. He was standing on a street corner, telling everyone about Jesus Christ. He had a little soap box he was standing on, and a Bible in his hand. And everyone was walking past, trying to avoid eye contact. Like you do. I wondered about …
Today we are going to talk about the Manicheans. Open up your digital painting program. Look at all the scales of grey that digital painting package has to offer. Everything from virgin A4 sheet to a colour only Anish Kapoor is allowed to paint in. So black you could paint a stuntship in that black …
Here’s what has happened over the last year. To your brain. One, you have been starved of stimulus. To a greater or lesser degree. You’ve had less dopamine, less oxytocin, less social interaction. Less sunlight, less exercise, less of every neuro-transmitter that helps regulate mood and happiness. Two, you have mainlined cortisol. Our brains produce …
Continue reading “Emerging from Lockdown 102: Banishing the brain fog”
I’m a quantum retailer. As I’ve explained before, on other blog posts, the way I approach any problem is to first identify the two competing paradigms, and then try and find the consensus position between them. The interplay between stock, organised play and money, say. Or the hotness versus the lukewarm shelves of things nobody …
The Quantum Retailer