It‘s funny how life has a habit of going full circle. Years ago my grandmother used to give her local greengrocer a list of the fruit and vegetables she wanted so he could deliver it to her house later that day to save her having to carry it home. Then big supermarkets came along and the idea of popping a list into the local greengrocer suddenly seemed so limiting.
It may surprise some of you that the Ann Summers Party Plan business is 25 years old this month and is as buoyant as it‘s ever been. For some of you, Party Plan will conjure up images from the 1950s of Tupperware parties and housewives buying plastic boxes over coffee: a seemingly old-fashioned way of shopping when you could go to a department store.
And yet this week more than 30,000 women will go to an Ann Summers party and buy the latest lingerie over a bottle of wine. Not bad for a sales channel you may have thought was stuck in the past.
I often hear retailers say that in order to distinguish themselves from the competition and to both attract and retain new customers, they must deliver a shopping experience that verges on entertainment.
Go to an Ann Summers party and you‘ll certainly get that. In fact, you‘ll probably laugh your socks off as one of our party organisers demonstrates our products, introduces a few games and shares some top tips with you and your friends.
The other Holy Grail for many retailers is the ability to deliver a more personal, customised shopping experience: the sort of old-fashioned service you used to get when you were on first-name terms with your local greengrocer. It‘s unreasonable to expect every member of staff to deliver this consistently across a nationwide chain of stores, so many mass retailers now try and crack it by using increasingly sophisticated software to analyse shopping transactional data and then communicate to customers through loyalty card statements.
In Party Plan, we‘re able to ask our customers directly what they like and are often on first-name terms too because we‘ve usually been invited along by a mutual friend. It‘s quite an old-fashioned approach but one that seems to be very much on trend today.
But it‘s not just the way we serve our customers and deliver their orders in Party Plan that puts us at the forefront of modern retailing trends. It‘s also the employment opportunities we offer. Years ago the image of women who worked as a party organiser was of a stay-at-home mum who was looking for a little extra pin money and an excuse to socialise with the girls.
Today the workplace mantra seems to be all about achieving a healthy work/life balance. Our Ann Summers Party Plan business offers flexible, full-time careers for women who want to run their own business or part-time work for women who have chosen to either develop another career in parallel or devote the majority of their time to caring for children or another relative. Whether they work full or part-time, our party organisers do so knowing that there are no limits to how much they can earn and that they are selling the latest new products from one of the most talked-about brands in retail.
Many of our party organisers tell me that they also love telling their friends that I‘m their boss but, given that they decide when and where they work and that we set ourselves up as a business to support them in everything they do, I think it‘s they who are my boss and I have to say I wouldn‘t want to work for anyone else.
