Ramsdens growing company-owned convenience store group of Today’s symbol stores operating across the North of England along the M62 corridor, has chosen Riverside Greetings, the UK’s number one supplier of greetings cards to the convenience and forecourt sector, as its sole greeting card supplier.
Following a very successful launch at Ramsdens Today’s stores in Cleethorpes, Howden and Hull earlier this year, the group has chosen Riverside Greetings as its sole supplier for greeting cards for all of its company owned stores.
Riverside Greetings took over the supply, category planning and management of the greeting card category at the flagship store in Cleethorpes by installing a new range of everyday cards along with point of sale designed to highlight the category to shoppers.
Andy Morrison, Ramsdens Trading Director, said: “The results of the change in supply have been excellent. In Cleethorpes sales are up 300%, the category profitability is up over 455% and cash has been freed up as stock is now supplied on a consignment basis meaning as a retailer we only pay for what we sell. This has resulted in Riverside Greetings been chosen to supply all of our company store sites.
“We are very pleased to see the fantastic growth in sales and profits. This collaboration with Riverside Greetings is delivering and our shoppers are clearly happy with the new offering. By effectively outsourcing the management of a very complex category to the experts we have been able to capitalise on a highly profitable opportunity. The team at Riverside Greetings are great to work with. They are flexible and responsive. We wish we had realised the opportunity sooner.
“We are now building on our company store experience and working with Riverside to further help our Dee Bee Wholesale customers also maximise their cards fixtures, using our direct to store central invoicing facility,” he added.
Commenting on the success of the collaboration, Riverside Greetings Managing Director, Andrew Glen, said: “We work hard to continuously develop our greeting card category offering specifically for the convenience and forecourt market. We know how to optimise the sales and profit opportunity of a convenience store and together with our category management, design, innovation and merchandising skills we deliver results.
“We regularly increase category sales in stores by a significant percentage when we take supply over. Our aim is to grow the category for our trade partners through great product, category knowledge and fantastic service and this example shows that we deliver. We look forward to developing the category further for Ramsdens convenience stores.”
Riverside Greetings is an independent publisher of greeting cards which supplies full service category solutions for the independent and symbol group convenience store and forecourt sectors. The company works on a UK wide basis and supplies a range of Riverside branded designs as well as designs from other leading publishers.
The Wakefield-based company has recently invested in a companywide rebrand in order to accelerate the sales potential of greeting cards to independent retail businesses.
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