Pete Hall, co-owner of Halls in Cardiff takes a moment to reflect on business over the past quarter.
First quarter report: “Our first quarter has been fab. It’s greeting cards all the way in our shop. We would be in big trouble if we had to rely on the sales of the gifts side of the shop. Our spring season trade has been similar to previous years, which is fine.”
The boons: “The good news is that we are very much up on card sales, mainly due to adding a ‘Welsh card shop’ within our card shop. We have increased the designs of Welsh language cards enormously thanks to the help of Hammond Gower, Lucilla Lavender, Tracks, Holy Mackerel and Two Little Monkeys – all English publishers with a Welsh dictionary and access to a digital printer no doubt. The only downside to increasing the number of designs in the shop is that customers expect you to have every eventuality like ‘Get well Granny’, ‘Aunty on her 40th’, ‘Wedding wishes to a Niece’. Worst of all we have been asked if we had a card for a daughter who had started her periods! Very odd.”
Buying patterns: “We have noticed a few changes in customer buying, the main one being that as we are a destination shop our customers now tend to plan ahead more and organise themselves better so they expect to see certain occasions out earlier and very much buy more than one card at a time.
We are always thinking about promoting the cards, especially as there are so few card shops in the Cardiff area, unlike Bristol or Bath where there seems to be an abundance of wonderful design-led card shops.
We have been very active on Twitter @hallsofllandaff, such as with our #card-of-the-day posts, and we have a little giggle on Facebook as well. In addition, there is a unique quality quarterly publication in Cardiff called City Life and we try and pop an advert in there whenever we can to promote us.”
