Getting Ready for Holiday Shopping

Last week, about a dozen game store owners from around the country gathered in Arizona for a business conference.  We had a delightful time touring area stores, enjoying lunches and dinners at great eateries, basking in a stretch of spectacular weather, and then, on the last day of the event, tearing down DSG's retail floor and rebuilding it to appeal to holiday shopping.

I am humbled beyond words that these friends and peers of mine would give so freely of themselves and their expertise and time and labor to help make my store better like this.  And make no mistake, it is better, even though it turned some of our process and routine on their sides.

We had some prerogatives to follow, based on the categories and how they performed over the initial year in Chandler.  For 2018, we need to see a good holiday season.  It will shape some of our decisions for years to come.  Every category has its own business attributes and objectives.  If we get to the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Nineteen and we haven't seen the kind of results we need out of a category, it's probably time for us to move in another direction, because after six-plus years in business it's unlikely that there's yet another approach we should have been trying, and more likely that it's a product category that we are just not positioned for.  Market saturation, lack of expertise, branding, whatever else is causing the suppression, it's obviously here to stay and we're wasting treasure we could be using to make Magic and video games better.

Indeed, Magic and video games are proven at this point, nothing that happens is going to stop us from continuing to invest in those categories this coming year at least.  We're approaching a healthy spot with Pokemon and we're going to continue working with our event champion on that because he seems to have a really good handle on it.  Other TCGs are a mixed bag lately so we'll see what happens.  Living Card Games are dead, and it's a shame that they are.

We see comics, minis, and RPGs as categories that appeal to people who are already deep in the hobby, who mostly already know what they are looking at when they stand in front of a store shelf.  Developing those categories mostly consists of bolstering what we already have and making it easier to shop, so that's the plan.

But board games, that's where we reach into the vast blue ocean mainstream of visitors, above and beyond the devoted board game faithful.  That's where our greatest growth potential is, that's where the size and scope of our store have the best chance to make an impression.  Board games did reasonably well for us in late 2017 despite the store suffering a bit from the move and whatever other factors.  We let the category lie fallow for most of mid-2018 because the key new releases don't tend to hit until late in the year and it wasn't tough to keep essentials on the racks at maintenance stock levels.

Now that it's coming up on that time again for the year, board games is our opportunity to "take a level."  It's our best chance to take the folks who wander over from the mini golf place next door and make them gamers.

With those guiding objectives in mind, my retailer friends cut loose on my retail floor and recombobulated just about the entire thing in the space of one long afternoon and evening.  Here's what happened.

Right from the entry you can see clear through the entire area, to the D&D racks at the back.  This is also highly visible when the store is closed for the night, so anyone who missed us can at least instantly see a ton of what we do: board games, video games, minis, and RPGs.

We put the kid-oriented and family-oriented games together and adjoined the all-ages comics to create a corner of the floor that caters to youth players and readers.  It's also close to the arcade so it's where they are likely to be walking toward or through anyway.

Light-hearted board game fare appears together with familiar titles and styles.

Deeper strategy titles are easy to locate and right in the center of the floor.

Demo tables!  I have some specific titles coming in to fill in the tables that aren't prepped yet, but Splendor is a perpetual winner so we'll likely keep that one set up.  Our pace of business is such that teaching an entire game is probably not realistic.  What I hope to be able to do with staff is speak competently to how the game plays.  "You try to collect the right combination of gems, and new gem cards come in to replace them, and when you have the gemstones these four nobles are looking for, they will come to you and you score their points.  So you can focus on scoring gem cards, scoring nobles, or combining the two, based on what gems come your way."

I had art prints on one of the RPG racks and while I think those are cool to have, I don't think DSG was well positioned to sell them.  Those are making their way up to a friend's store in Colorado where he will experiment with them and see how that goes.  Our two RPG racks now are going to be spiffed up a bit to where one of them is all-D&D-all-the-time, and the other features other RPGs as well as comic trades and accessories (the comic section adjoins to the right).

We experimented with a combined paint rack tower and after a few Tetris attempts we realized it wasn't as shoppable as we thought.  But the rearranging got the paint out of a corner alley where it was even less shoppable, so we didn't want to put it back the way it was.  We found an answer right out of the old DSG Gilbert location: now that Warhammer and the D&D minis are spread out across multiple aisles, each aisle caps nicely with a paint rack.

Party games are one of the better-traffic categories we have for tabletop and they appeal to mainstream shoppers.  We found it possible to combine it all here in a mid-floor rack rather than having it off to the side blocking the throughway to the game room.

Anyway we have a bit more work to do to bring this project home, including bringing sleeves, playmats, and card storage out onto a gridwall rack that we didn't have before.

What did we lose?  That square footage had to come from somewhere.  With no prerelease on the horizon until January and the end of the PPTQ program for Magic, we took advantage of not needing as much event floor.  With some careful adjustment there we actually don't lose much seating either.  Basically the "gate" area between the main room and game room is still kind of a mess as we figure out the best way to situate everything.  In the long run, with two new stores opening for every one that closes, we need to add shopping strength more than we need to add event strength.  (Our event strength is also already pretty good, possibly wastefully so.)

It's October 23rd, and that means we have just a touch over two months to see what happens.  Already over the weekend we saw the sales mix get a little more variety, in what was otherwise a slightly below average frame.  We have a lot of inventory on hand already and more already scheduled to arrive in the weeks ahead.  It's go time.  Store looks ready.