AF Blakemore unveiled Blakemore Trade Partners Plus, a new investment package and rebate scheme, at SRS25: Better Together, the SPAR retail show in Telford.
With the ability to earn up to 8% rebate, enhanced digital tools, and sector-specific support services, the new programme sets a benchmark in the convenience sector – reaffirming AF Blakemore’s position as the partner of choice for ambitious independent retailers.
The new £4.5m investment package supports the commercial proposition for convenience store retailers, offering a powerful package of tools and retail expertise designed to help stores thrive in an evolving and competitive market.
Developed for both existing partners and prospective retailers, the proposition brings together best-in-class wholesale capability with deep operational experience as a convenience retailer. From logistics to layout, insight to innovation – it’s a proposition built to deliver sustainable sales growth.
At its core is a simple idea: true partnership, working together to grow sales.
“As a convenience retailer ourselves, we know this sector inside-out,” says Tomas Blakemore, Retail Sales Director at A.F. Blakemore. “We understand the missions that matter, from Food for Now to Food for Later, and we’ve created solutions that work at store level – with the right product ranges, in-house logistics offering market-leading service levels, and bespoke store design that helps retailers stand out.”
Retailers joining Blakemore Trade Partner Plus gain access to an unrivalled suite of powerful tools which aim to help with success, including:
• Bespoke store blueprints and planograms
• Rich customer insight and tailored category advice
• Award-winning own-brand ranges
• Exclusive NPD and promotional mechanics
• Flexible, scalable store solutions and ongoing support from experienced teams.
Retailers will also benefit from a market leading value and support package. This includes access to rebate advances of up to £150,000 to fund store development, discounted EPOS, digital screens, and marketing activation support.
Teams will also provide expert store merchandising to maximise layout and flow, market-leading wholesale pricing and a highly competitive rebate structure.
“This initiative reflects who we are as a business,” added Matt Teague, Managing Director, Retail. “A family-owned convenience retailer that understands the realities our partners face – and invests in solutions that work.
As a fourth-generation independent family business, A.F. Blakemore is committed to championing the success of independent retailers across its distribution area.
“We’re invested in shared success,” continued Matt, “It’s not about offering a one-size-fits-all model – it’s about equipping each retailer with the right tools, insight, and support to drive growth on their terms.”
Commenting on SRS25 overall, Tom Blakemore added: “SRS25 was full of energy — it’s clear that retailers are looking for innovation and growth, and the atmosphere throughout the event reflected that. It was the ideal moment to unveil Blakemore Trader Partner Plus, our market leading independent retailer terms package. With a £4.5m investment in price, the ability to earn up to 8% rebate, enhanced digital tools, and access to added value support services, the programme sets a new benchmark in the convenience sector. We’re proud to reaffirm our position as the partner of choice and are excited to demonstrate, as we always do, that we are committed to partnerships and we really believe we are Better Together.”
Matt Teague and Sarah Ellis, Group Marketing Director at AF Blakemore, spoke to Wholesale Manager about how the technologies demonstrated at SRS25 will help retailers succeed.
How did SRS exemplify the theme of Better Together?
Matt: The announcement made at the show was probably the single biggest announcement we have made in a very long time. And we understand what independent retailers are having to deal with, whether that be energy pricing, the cost of what’s happening in the budget, the pressures on what’s in the market in terms of their offering. That’s why we’ve made the announcement we made about marketing rebates, a four and a half million-pound investment in cost price. That’s giving independent retailers added value benefits. A great example is the digital POS which takes task out of the operation. That’s a real demonstration of what it means to be with Blakemore and be our partner.
What tools were demonstrated at the show to help SPAR retailers succeed?
Matt: Many technologies were demonstrated, including digital POS, electronic shelf edge labels, headsets, top stocks, energy efficient equipment.
From a proposition perspective, we demonstrated food for now and food for later, underpinned by Harriet’s County Bridge fresh meat, Philpotts for food lovers and Philpotts for coffee lovers. There’s a richness of opportunity that we’ve been able to deliver this time. And that’s just the start.
How can SPAR’s food to go and food for later ranges boost customer visit and spending?
Matt: I think it’s about the quality of the product, the freshness of the product that we offer, the deals that we offer. The work the service team do in terms of delivering that, and the campaign that we have got through the summer, those solutions support great quality fresh food. When you talk about the customer coming back to stores, then they’ll see that real quality shining through.
When they’re purchasing that do you think it increases the basket spend?
Matt: 100%, yes,
How can SPAR assist retailers in optimising store layouts to improve flow and sales?
Sarah: We’ve done an awful lot of data analysis work on what goes in customers’ baskets, so we’ve identified our core customer shopping missions, and then underneath that, at a category level, and then underneath that at a SKU level. We know which SKUs go in which baskets, in which missions, and then we can lay the store out to optimise that. From a retailer perspective, we’ll say this type of store is a big basket store, therefore your primary missions are food for later and fresh essentials. You will walk in on produce, then you’ll have meat, opposite will be tinned and grocery. So we lay the store out purely based on what the customer needs are in the local area.
We’ve got a variety of retailers within our estate. Some will take our planograms and work with them, and some will do their own thing. We have got core principles that we can we share with them that says this is the type of spacing that you need to have in your store, this is our recommended layout for your format. Any retailer can access all of that information, but then we come into our own if they’re thinking of doing something new with their store. We were having a conversation earlier with one of our retailers who had got a refit with a new in-store Subway and didn’t know what to do with the space. We said to him, we’ve looked at all of your data, we’ve looked at your competitor set data. This is where you’re missing a trick. So therefore, this is what your store layout needs to look like.
Are many SPAR retailer taking your advice?
Matt: Yes, absolutely. Sarah’s team have been able to create a richness of data. More and more retailers have been really inquisitive about that, and because we have presented it in a really clear way, they can understand and interpret that for their store format, and they see the benefit of that. The other big advantage that we’ve got is that we have a company-owned store estate where these things go in. They get tried and tested. We take the learnings and we say that’s what you need to do.
Is it the younger retailers that are embracing the insight and data or the older ones?
Matt: We are talking about entrepreneurs. I don’t think age come into it. At the end of the day, everybody wants to grow. Whatever tools we can give them to grow, they will be interested in.
How can effective store operational planning and the sharing of best practice drive efficiency for SPAR retailers?
Matt: We continue to invest. This year we are invested in a workforce management labour planning tool. We’re going to be pulling that into our company-owned store estate with the added value benefits of our Partners Plus programme. Then once we get it perfected, we’ll be offering that to the whole SPAR estate. Our workforce management system will understand the sales trends in the store, It will understand the tasks that have to be performed in the store every day. It will understand the variable tasks that have to be performed in-store on the day and will advise on a labour model to carry that out to satisfy the customer needs, understanding what needs to be done to operate and fulfil that. It’s got AI, so it’s constantly learning.
Sarah: It also takes into account the weather, so if it is a really hot day, the system will tell the retailer to stock more ice cream.
The Baldwin Cup 2025 winner was announced during the conference. What qualities did this retailer demonstrate that earned them the award?
Matt: I think they are a community retailer at heart. We’re a family-owned business supplying family-owned businesses. They operate at the heart of their community. One of the qualities they have is that they tailor their offer to the community, whether they’re supporting them through community projects, or by fulfilling their needs. That’s what always shines through in all of our winners.
How did the SRS 25 show go and what did you get out of it?
Matt: Blakemore Trade Partners Plus was a key announcement. From what I’ve heard in the feedback from retailers, they are really intrigued by the concept, and so we’re really excited about that. When we put that program together, we don’t do it just because we are Blakemore, we do it because we can do that through our guild. It’s the guild retailers who helped us to shape it, that’s the power of being in SPAR, the guild members, and they really helped us. So from what I’ve heard so far, as
Sarah: At the end of the conference session, we kept some of our prospective retailers behind to have a Q&A with them and our guild retailers. There was no pre-briefing of the kind of questions that were going to come up. One of the retailers said to us at the end, I cannot believe that we’re here with you guys, just having a chat with Peter and Carol. We’re just talking about our business. We’d never get this anywhere else. It’s family businesses investing in other family businesses.
Are the prospective SPAR retailers currently with a symbol group, or are they purely independent?
Matt: It’s a mix of both. One of our values is operating with honesty and integrity, so we’re in there being open and honest about what we are and what we want to do with them.
Sarah: There were other retailers in the room to offer support, but were actually saying give me the mic, because I want to talk about my experience working with you guys and why I switched. Three of them, Tristan. Jenny and Tom all said let us give you the retailer side of it.
Do a lot of the prospective retailers convert to SPAR?
Matt: Yes, and from what I have heard, I think we’re in for a good time, because we got a good pipeline of around 60 retailers.
What were the key reasons for SPAR retailers to attend SRS 25?
Matt: These events are key because retailers get to share ideas with like-minded people. They get to meet subject matter experts across the business, and they get to meet suppliers face to face. How often do they get the chance to do that?
What are your goals for what you want to achieve in your role?
Matt: It’s quite straightforward. My ambition is to grow this business, absolutely grow it. We’ve got a budget that we will fulfil this year, and then we’ve got a growth plan over the next five years. My job is to achieve that and to grow independent retail businesses, grow our company-owned stores, and grow the mix of our business, and make this business more profitable.
Sarah: We say we want happy and profitable retailers, which is what we aim to deliver. We’re equipped to do it.
Tell us about the new summer campaign, Love Summer. What products and activities are involved in the campaign?
Sarah: It’s multi layered. From an in-store perspective, it’s about the summer moments and the food orientated summer moments, barbecues, picnics, all of the products associated with eating great food in traditional British summer time activities. That builds up into gamification, we’ve got a game that drives vouchers. It gives money off some of our product. And then we’ve got the spark, the conversation element of the campaign, which is driven around real insight about men and barbecues. The man’s domain is the barbecue but what they won’t necessarily do at the barbecue is have a chat about how they’re feeling.
We’re working with Colin Jackson, the Olympic athlete and a real advocate for mental health, to encourage people, while they’re cooking great food, to have that conversation about how they’re really feeling. The campaign begins in-store and goes back to being anchored in the community. It’s still underpinned by product, so it still drives footfall into store. We’re also working alongside the Blakemore Foundation, which is our charitable arm of the business, to make some donations to mental health charities across our area so that they can carry on with the great work they do locally.
What promotional activities is Blakemore currently running?
Sarah: We’ve got a number of everyday ones that run all year round, we’ve got Tesco price match. We went to the ONS, the Office of National Statistics and said what items are in every customer’s shopping basket, then we made sure that we got a really competitive price on those products. Then we’ve got the solution deals. We’ve got Lunchtime Sorted, which gives £4.25 and then a £5 meal solution to drive some trade and Dinner Sorted is pizza and a side for £5.50. These deals run all the time in stores. We build our promotional pack on top of that, and that changes every three weeks.
What activity does SPAR UK have with Leicester Tigers?
Sarah: We’re the official shorts sponsor of Leicester Tigers. You see our logo emblazoned down the shorts. But it’s more about the community outreach that we get with Leicester Tigers, we are the sponsors of their under-10 Community Cup. The reason we chose to sponsor that is it’s about healthy lifestyle. It’s about getting kids active, but also it’s about respect. When they choose the winners of the under-10 Community Cup, it’s not just on who scored the most points. It’s actually on who had the most respect for their teammates, who had the most respect for the referee. It’s a really nice way of kind of saying it’s about healthy lifestyles, but it’s also about being part of the team, that everybody’s got the role to play in the team, and you respect each other.
That enables us to get the brand in the hands of customers around our stores. Leicester Tigers cover a big chunk of our geographical area: Leicester, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Norfolk, Nottinghamshire. The under-10 Community Cup does activity across all of those areas and we have been at every one of those events with our retailers with a big SPAR stand, from County Bridge bacon and sausage baps in the morning through to SPAR competitions for the kids. We get to use the players for activity. They recently did a tenner challenge for us where they had to fill a SPAR bag with £10 of groceries. It’s a nice partnership with Leicester Tigers, they are one of the most successful teams, it’s the alignment of values between the two. We started the partnership last year and we signed up for three years.
We have also got a partnership with Glamorgan Cricket, and in our first year they won the one day. So I was thinking, I can start to negotiate on the basis that Glamorgan won, and the Tigers were going to win the Premiership.
How can SPAR retailers grow shopper basket spend?
Sarah: Tesco Price Match delivers twice the value of basket than a basket without it. It’s investing in those low value items the customer is buying on a day in, day out basis, and then building up through those solutions. Customers are looking for value, but that doesn’t always mean the cheapest price. They are saying take that thinking away from me, give me a really good idea for tonight’s meal, or give me a really good idea for a picnic or a barbecue. That is being really clear on what the customer missions are and delivering against it. It’s thinking about the whole of the day, from a breakfast and coffee deal, through lunch, to tonight’s meal, and then overlay those occasions on the back of it. Our company-owned stores did brilliantly on Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day this year.
Matt: We took the opportunity to be reckless, we took a couple of stores and put a crazy amount of flowers in there. Our store in Coventry took five grand on Mother’s Day. I thought there’s the lesson, just be reckless. If we hadn’t done that, it could have taken us 10 years to get that level. Next year, we will build on it.
Tell us about the recent research Blakemore has done with Barclays on shopper habit. What insights were gained from the research?
Sarah: We’ve been working with Barclays for quite a while now. We take their bank data, all anonymised, and it gives us a really interesting view of our customers. It tells us when was the last time the bulk of our customers came into our stores. It gives us a view of their socio demographic profile, which areas are targeted. It also tells us our average transaction value against our competitors, but we can drill that right the way down to a store level. As we’re thinking about which stores we invest in, all of our own sales data goes into a model. We take stores, we take sales per square foot but then we can say what’s our headroom? Because we know what our opportunity is out of customers that walk into our store and spend somewhere else. We also know what our opportunity is for customers who have never set foot into our store within a two-mile catchment area of each store. We can look and say, that store should be operating in this type of format, it isn’t currently. What does its space look like, what does the marketing support look like, and therefore, what do we need to do to turn it around?
One store near Cardiff we looked at two years ago was a very small format store. It was trading very much as a traditional convenience store but had a very affluent demographic around it. We could see where we were losing sales and went in and reformatted the store. There are Tesco Expresses around the corners, there are independents and florists nearby. We put Philpotts in there, different food to go solutions we led in on fresh, with beautiful, loose, fresh produce, and fresh meats. It helps us to inform our thinking,
Is fresh food a concern for retailers because of the risk of wastage?
Sarah: It came up at the show when we had the conversation with our retailers, one of them said, I’m buying a Co-op, where do we sit from a fresh perspective? One of the brilliant things about Blakemore is the single pick, you can build your fresh sales without having to worry about wastage. They enable you to go on that journey rather than just having a massive pack size which they can never take, because they can’t take the waste that supports it.
Matt: The single pack element is key to what Sarah has articulated. Under the new trading terms, there will be an overall service payment every week but for that, they will get single pick free of charge.
What are your goals for what you want to achieve in your role?
Sarah: My goal is that every store will be set up to meet the needs of the customer, and that we’ve helped the retailer deliver that through really good insight that says this is who your customer is. These are the missions they are on. These are the products that you need to stock, this is your pricing strategy to support it.
Also at the show was Ian Lewis, director at SPAR Minster Lovell, who chatted to Wholesale Manager about how Blakemore helps him grow his business.
Why did you give up IT and get into retailing?
It was due to childcare, with my parents’ house being connected to the shop. I was an IT engineer, my ex-wife when we had our first child said, do you want to work to pay for childcare, or do you want to give your mum and dad that opportunity to see our son grow up? It just worked, I would walk in for a shift, drop my son off with mum and dad, walk through another door and do an 8-hour shift. I was able to nip in and see my son grow up. It absolutely worked and gave me the flexibility to do school runs.
It wasn’t that I wanted to go back into the family business, and I didn’t think I would enjoy it as much as I did. I was used to looking after 2,500 people in IT.
I started enjoying it when I said we are refitting the shop because I can’t deal with this. It was old fashioned.
I had worked in the shop when I was younger, did the graveyard shift at half five in the morning before school. I had wanted to stay away from the shop so I could separate work and family. I went in IT straight out of school from the age of 19 until I was 32 and I was quite good at it.
Has your IT background helped you as a retailer?
Yes, it gave me a corporate background, and I understood how businesses were run. My parents may not have had the procedures and policies in place. It was a case of monthly paper accounts. In my training, my dad said you write in this book each customer’s name, their address, postcode, the amount they owe. I said, have you never heard of Excel? He said, what’s that?
I took each part of the business and said how can I make that work for me?
Neither my sister, my dad or my mum really adopted change because they don’t fully understand it. That was the biggest problem: I knew what I was trying to do, and I knew it would work, but they didn’t fully understand it, not even the electronic labels.
Even today, I got a message saying we discovered the product is this price, the label says a different price. Can anyone sort this out? In the old days, that wouldn’t be sorted out until Monday when I get back to the business, but now I can go back to my hotel room and sort it out on my laptop. It’s paid dividends, I think.
Tell us about your store: location, size and what demographic of customers do you serve?
It’s1,800 square foot, in a small village in West Oxfordshire called Minster Lovell, an affluent area. It’s in the Cotswolds, Idris Elba lives in the village, as do a few other celebrities. We serve a really wide demographic, in ages and ethnicity. You see the same people every day, but then you see people visiting the Cotswolds.
There are no supermarkets in the village, but there are in Whitney, the next town, which is three miles away.
So many supermarkets have opened but we haven’t been impacted.
Jeremy Clarkson’s pub The Farmer’s Dog is half a mile away, I thought it would make a real impact on our business, but it doesn’t seem to have done. We’re hidden by a canopy of trees, and I’ll be looking for options to get something on the main road to say SPAR this way.
Oxfordshire County Council Highways say if I put a sign up, they will see it as a distraction and put it in the back of a van.
What product categories and services do you stock?
There isn’t anything we don’t do, except there’s no cash point. I’ve just had a note today to say our InPost locker is being installed next Monday, so that’s just another string to our bow. We do Collect+, Royal Mail, UPS, all the parcel services, but that’s going to take a lot away from the store. You sometimes think what have I just done that for? Why is a car tyre taking up space in the stock room for the 20p I get on the transaction? But sometimes the customer says I didn’t know you were here, I can’t believe how big the shop is.
How long has the store been in the family?
Since 1937. It was founded by my great uncle and auntie, then was run by my grandparents, Cecil and Doris. Then my dad and his first wife ran it, but she sadly died, and then my mum and dad got together. My dad has been there since 1967.
How long has the store been with SPAR?
Since 1991, when I was 11. It was Capper & Co when we first joined SPAR, it wasn’t Blakemore. I have never asked him the full story. I would guess the store was an independent and Capper & Co approached my dad and said, this is what we could do here. We have never looked back.
Bizarrely, Co-op came in just before my brother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer and offered to buy us out. I think there was a shall we, shan’t we moment, but as soon as they said we’d knock the family home down, my mom said no. My brother-in-law sadly died shortly after, so it wasn’t the right time. We get the odd bit of interest, Nisa might send a flyer, but no hard offer.
What innovations have you made in your store?
We try to keep relevant and try and stay up to date. We have tried things and failed at them, so we get rid of that and move on. We had an orange juice machine, but it didn’t work because the fruit flies were an absolute nightmare. We’re also limited by space.
We do Food to Go, that’s something that’s just grown and grown. It includes Costa Coffee, rolls and sandwiches prepared in store. The first member of staff gets in at 4.30am and we don’t open until 6 so she will be baking. With fresh food, you have to take the risk of wastage. You never know if the weather’s going to turn on you, like this weekend, I’ve got big salads, sausages. The weather looks fair but it only takes a snap in the weather to lose my investment.
We use technology, we run suggestive ordering. It looks at algorithms, it looks at sales data, minimum stock level, what it needs over those specific days, for example it orders more bacon on a Friday than it would on a Monday. On Monday, I ran an order, tweaked the systems and it told me what I needed to cover the stock until Monday. Normally I would order £4,000 of ambient stock on a Monday, £6,000 on a Wednesday, and probably £5,000 on a Friday. I had a £13,500 pounds order because I tweaked it, I told the system I need to cover stock levels until Monday, because I’m not going to place one tomorrow. They are the sort of things that make me think, how would I even run a store without that?
We do goodie bags, magic bags, we call them, which contain anything that’s going to go in the bin that night. It’s £10 worth of goods, but they pay £3. I might put in a loaf of bread, a spring onion and a bag of potatoes.
The store is opposite a pub. How do the pub and store complement each other? Does the pub bring you extra customers?
We’ve got a really good relationship, me and the landlady get on really well, and that’s a challenge. But I give them 20% off their goods and they let me use their car park. That works really well. In the morning, when they’re not open, if I’ve got the Blakemore lorry in the layby taking up six spaces, it can park in the pub car park.
If someone has a pint of Birra Moretti in there and thinks they like the taste of that but they can only have one, they are driving, they will pop over the shop, and it’s literally opposite. If I walk in there for a pint, they will ask me what time I close and I’ll go back, get them a pack of cigarettes and come back to the pub. They look out for us, we look out for them.
Tell us about the robberies your store has been through, how are you reacted to the robberies, and how SPAR and Blakemore helped you deal with this situation?
In September last year there was an attempt on the cash machine. It was traumatic, but not anywhere near what happened on Boxing Day night. In September, people came in with angle grinders and cut through the doors, there was no damage. They tried to get the CCTV out, pulled a few wires out, but coming from an IT engineer background, I had cased it in a rack so they would never get that out. It was traumatic for mum and dad, it took a bit of time for us to recover, but we got the doors fixed.
I told mum and dad, don’t worry, that won’t ever happen again. They know they can’t get the cash machine out. By pure luck, we had put it too close to the wall. They couldn’t get the angle grinders down, they didn’t even attempt it. They barely stole anything from the shop.
I had forgotten about it and then on Boxing Day night, I don’t think I’ll ever forget my dad’s voice in the voicemail I got from him. He was in tears, my mum was screaming in the background. I jumped up out of bed and drove over there. I was imagining the worst. and it was the worst, the shop was absolutely wrecked.
We’d had the doors replaced on the insurance. They went through £9,000 worth of doors with sledgehammers because I think they knew that the updated doors had certain locks, and they wouldn’t be able to crowbar them open.
They broke in the front, got a pulley to the back of the store, wrapped it round the cash machine, pulled it out and took everything with it. There were trolleys that we had put in at night, a flower stand, a newspaper stand, they took all that. If it wasn’t for the damage, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. If it was a standalone store, I could deal with it. But my mum and dad live there, that’s the hardest thing. My dad was banging on the front windows as the robbers were loading the cash machine into their car.
My mum didn’t go to bed for six weeks and slept on the sofa. She’s registered blind, so she can’t replay everything that’s happened. She can’t see that CCTV footage, she can’t see what they look like, what they were wearing, what they did,
The police have got a DNA match. There was an M40 crash involving four passengers, two died and two survived who were arrested and their DNA matched that found on the security screen at our store.
Those guys were sat around a dinner table on that Christmas Day knowing they were going to rob the store and they would have known that my parents live there. My mum and dad don’t deserve that, they’ve worked tirelessly, my dad is 83 and he’s still doing a paper round twice a week. He still fills his beloved drinks chiller for 6 hours a day. My mum’s involved as much as she can be. I’m not sure I would have got through it without Blakemore. If I’d been a stand-alone store, where would I have got someone to come out on December 27 to put a significant board in that frame? Matt Teague phoned me straight away, Russ Madden, Andy Herron and all of those guys were brilliant. The Country Choice girls all came down and helped put the store back together because obviously we were so behind with everything. I still had paid for everything, I still had orders. We were closed for 24 hours. People from the village helped as well. I have never known glass and egg to be so difficult to get off a ceramic floor. We are still finding glass now. You’ll pull a shelf apart to clean it and glass will fall out.
It felt a little bit like Covid. Everyone felt this is our family unit now, we need to just bunker down. But everyone came to our rescue. The staff came in to help clear up and didn’t want to be paid. But in equal measures, it was the worst possible period of our lives. Unfortunately, my sister went on a three-and-a-half-month world cruise for her honeymoon, it had been booked for two years. She left on the Friday after it happened. I was trying to keep my family together, trying to keep mum and dad sane and safe, trying to secure everything.
What advice would you give to other retailers to help them improve their business?
We’re just a village store, we might have SPAR on the fascia, but we’re not good enough to compete with all these guys we see in the trade press. Speaking on stage at SRS four years ago changed how I perceived the retail business, I found a confidence. We are a smallish store in the Cotswolds, we could just go under the radar and just carry on doing what we’re doing, and have no store activations, have no social media. But no matter what size you are, dream big.
Do retailers advise each other and bounce ideas off each other?
Yes, it’s difficult when everyone’s attached to a different symbol group. But we sit on different panels, and I might do something that someone else looks at and says great idea, we all bounce stuff off each other. I think we give each other a little bit of confidence. You try and strive to be the best. My dad is going to try to retire in October. It will be 13 years this October that I have been in retail, and I’ve always wanted him to be able to walk away and have a bit of peace that he’s done a great job, but the shop is in good hands, and that’s what I strive for every day. I tell him, it’s going to be okay.
Tell us about your relationship with Blakemore. How do they help you grow your business?
Their family values resonate with us. I’m lucky enough to be on the Blakemore guild which is the middleman between the retailers and the SPAR board, I wouldn’t have a bad word said against Blakemore. I’ll stick up for them all the time on the Facebook retailer page. I always champion them, I’ve got a great relationship with them, and I’m very lucky. I know some retailers aren’t in the same position, where you’re in a WhatsApp group with sales director, the MD, the CEO, the marketing director. I always try to help other retailers by being a guild committee member.
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