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Case Studies
The Gentleman's Shop  
   

The Gentleman's Shop
www.gentlemans-shop.com

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. Read about his experience of running Actinic Desktop and now Actinic Online ecommerce solutions.

A Close Shave for The Gentleman’s Shop
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, G. B. Kent and many, many more. Prices range from a few pounds for a jar of facial scrub to £600 for a DOVO open razor set.

To get this far the couple have learnt many lessons along the way and experienced more approaches to ecommerce than most small businesses.

Originally Actinic desktop ecommerce software was recommended by a customer. Despite being a novice with computers, in the four weeks Charlotte was able to put together a site that paid for itself within a fortnight. She says,
"The software was very logical and straightforward to use – not just for me, but for visitors placing orders."
This ecommerce solution worked really well for The Gentleman’s Shop for several years. Their success allowed them to relocate to a thatched, Grade II listed premises of Charnham House in May 2002.

In the Summer of 2003 they were approached by a new media company promising to build them a bespoke website on its Polaris platform.

Robert Johnston takes up the story:
“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.

Although we had at least 20,000 unique visitors a month and our sales reached the levels of our Actinic days every time we wanted a change to the site functionality, such as moving the payment provider, we had quotes of several thousand as the site was based on Polaris which required hiring a specialist programmer.”

Finally in April 2005 the couple were told that the website would no longer be supported. Worse they could not find anyone willing to take on their hosting and support. Robert commented,
“Luckily we were approached again by Actinic who offered us Actinic Business Plus which at the time was their upgraded version of the Catalog product. We gave them our wish list of features and design requirements. The completed site was handed over within one month and cost a fraction of our custom-made store.”

Robert and Charlotte choose Actinic Business Plus for the multi-user ability because they wanted to be able to maintain the site and process orders from two separate, but networked machines. This gave them flexibility to work simultaneously on different tasks, or even, as orders grow, use the option to have two people processing orders.

Having been the first retailer of Gentleman’s grooming products on the internet, the Gentleman’s shop had a very good position in the marketplace. The recession however changed everything, Robert commented,
 
“Our niché market suddenly had less to spend on luxury grooming products. Coupled with the massive growth of online only male grooming websites and discounting by some of our suppliers through their own distribution channels we experienced a drop in sales of 70% over the first two quarters of 2011 so we had to radically change our approach. To cover the shortfall in income from our website we started to list our products on Amazon. However having spent the last six months of 2011 constantly extracting feeds from Actinic desktop and uploading them to Amazon to maintain correct stock levels we started looking for alternative solutions. We also needed a mobile optimised version of our site to keep up with our customer requirements as well as attract new ones. This time Actinic the latest cloud based SaaS ecommerce solution from Actinic was the answer.”

On launch they added their store to a Facebook page and enabled a dedicated mobile site and seamlessly integrated their product with stock to Amazon so all of their orders could be processed from the Actinic Online back office irrespective of where the order was placed.

Robert commented,

“With my love of social media such as Facebook and Twitter I wanted a way for our customers to carry The Gentleman’s Shop with them so that they could find us quickly.”

The next phase therefore was the TGS App available for free on iTunes and Google play. Launched on 15th December 2012 it enables users to quickly access the mobile store, Facebook & Twitter feeds, video and all the contact information for The Gentleman’s Shop all in one place. To date they have already had 2500 downloads, 95% of these are on Apple devices. This also enables them to send messages via push technologies to their App users to keep in touch and inform them of special offers.
One of the big advantages of Actinic is the flexibility for multiple users to access and work on the site from different locations via an internet connection and to have all sales channels covered.

Robert commented,

“One of our biggest concerns about moving from Actinic Desktop to Online was about what would happen to our Google rankings. We setup 80 friendly url's that are identical to our old Actinic Desktop site which has maintained a level of traffic from Google while we wait for the new site to be fully indexed. Despite being in the Google no mans land between the old and new site we have retained our first page listing for searches such as "shaving brush" and with no extra marketing our conversion rate has increased from 1% to 5% since moving to Actinic Online. Our average basket is now 20% larger than our previous site hopefully this can be maintained, only time will tell.

Actinic is a response to the constantly moving pattern of online retailing. Once it was good enough to have a website, but the power of Amazon and growth of mobile commerce cannot be ignored and multi-channel retailing is the way forward. We wouldn’t have kept up without our ecommerce solution partner Actinic.”
Having tried bespoke, boxed and now web-based cloud ecommerce solutions, Robert and Charlotte are now confident that their present approach has the right balance of cost, flexibility and functionality. The cloud architecture enables updates of the Actinic ecommerce solution to happen easily to keep up with the latest developments in the every changing ecommerce landscape.