Case Study - The Gentleman's Shop

A Close Shave for The Gentleman’s Shop
The trials and tribulations of one company’s experience with three ecommerce approaches

Having a close shave is an everyday experience for Robert Johnston and his customers. He has run a successful barber's shop in the Berkshire market town of Hungerford since 1988 and prides himself on the closeness of the shave he and his six barbers offer with their traditional open blade razors.

In 1997 the shop moved to larger premises which allowed Robert’s wife, Charlotte, to set up The Gentleman's Shop as both a physical shop, and two years later a web store. Both sell luxury shaving and grooming products as well as accessories and gifts for men from top London brands like Geo. F Trumper, Truefitt & Hill, Simpsons, GB Kent and many, many more. Prices go from a few pounds for a jar of facial scrub to £600 for a Dovo open razor set. Many customers (20%) come from North America who see Britain as the home of the finest shaving brands, while the remainder of the trade is split 60% UK and 20% to the rest of the world. Online trade now accounts for 40-50% of the rapidly growing total turnover.

To get this far the couple have learnt many hard lessons and had more experiences with different approaches to ecommerce than most small businesses.

Selling online started with what proved an expensive mistake using a web-based shopping mall. "It was costing us a monthly charge of £50 in 1999 and a further £15 a month for every additional fifty items we listed,” says Charlotte. “We could see ourselves easily spending up to £2,000 a year while being tied to the site and having to start again from scratch if we moved. What's more, prices could go up at any time. As we were getting more and more locked in there would be little we could do about it.

"We also found we couldn't update the site as we wanted. We had to use the mall company who weren't very responsive. It all came to a head when the programmer went on holiday in December 1999. Our site simply disappeared on Christmas Day and didn't return properly until the third week in January."

Luckily one of Robert’s customers came to the rescue with a copy of the desktop ecommerce package, Actinic Catalog. Despite being a novice with computers, in the four week downtime Charlotte was able to put together a site that paid for itself within a fortnight. She says, “The software is very logical and straightforward to use – not just for me, but for visitors placing orders. And another strong point in Catalog's favour is we had the flexibility to move between hosting companies without losing any time or money or interrupting our internet sales.”

This ecommerce solution worked really well for The Gentleman’s Shop for several years, and following the relocation to the thatched, Grade II listed premises of Charnham House in May 2002 they had their best twelve month trading period ever with 50% growth in web sales.

Robert Johnston takes up the story: “Then in the summer of 2003 we were approached by a new media company promising to build us a bespoke website on its Polaris platform. The company was behind Thorntons’ website and had a great track record of helping small businesses reach their ecommerce aspirations. We agreed to pay a figure of about £45,000 over two years, for a bespoke website, with the aim of increasing the number of visitors and the order value. We were on course to be the “ Boden” of the male grooming world.”

They were pleased with the design of the new site and when it became New Media Age magazine’s “Site of the Week” on launch. It was also well received by customers, but u nfortunately sales results were disappointing and it took less money so the Johnstons were not impressed by this poor return on their heavy investment.

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