It can happen to the best of brick and mortar video stores, those periods when sales go flat, if only briefly. Especially in these days of escalating gas prices and online competition, consumers can be fickle.
Various retailers around the country have developed their own strategies for perking up sluggish sales.
Daryl Jenkins, owner of A View to Video in Oxnard, Calif., has adhered to the traditional wisdom. “When things get slow,” he said, “you mark things down a little bit to get ’em back in there. I did a Buy 1 Get 1 Free last month. That seemed to help quite a bit. I did it with the companies that kind of worked with me. They cut the prices to where I could afford to do a Buy 1 Get 1 Free.”
Jenkins’ two stores sell both general and adult videos, with “three or four times” more of the latter. “Most people don’t run specials with adult. They’ll run specials all day long with their front-room stuff, but they don’t run specials with their adult product. You gotta run specials,” he insisted.
One of his sales tricks is putting the same title in different parts of the store, at different prices. A new girl-girl release from Platinum X, for example, could wind up with one copy in the lesbian section, another in the Platinum X section. “I like it best,” he said, “when a guy pulls up a movie, goes, ‘How come it’s $19.95 here, and it’s $27.95 there?' I’m rewarding the guy that’s actually shopping.”
Shauna Coverdale, half of the couple that owns DK Wilds in Beaverton, Ore., also believes in specials, with a bit of a difference. “When video sales start to lag,” she said, “we put some new feature films in the sale sections. When someone walks by and sees new features in a sale section, they are very likely to look through and find something to take home.”
She added that when things slow down, “it’s usually because there is one price point that isn’t moving. For instance, our $29.95 section was pretty stagnant for a while, so we ran some ads in the sports pages and special-priced them at four for $70.”
Fellow Oregonian Logan Creighton of Portland’s venerable Mr. Peeps adult store also uses store specials to “get the product moving again.” He agreed that what works best is discounts on the newer, bigger titles. “We don’t usually do Buy 2 Get 1 Free, anything like that. We just take the titles that people have been really wanting to see and put them on sale.”
As for advertising, he believes there’s nothing better than word of mouth.
While asserting that his own stores haven’t had any slow sales periods, Mark Franks, CEO of Phoenix, Ariz.-based Castle Mega Stores, said that he knows of other stores that have. “I’ve been hearing it from a lot of people. Which is not really surprising to me. I’ve been in this business quite a while, and it’s a business that’s been changing. Today, you have to apply good retail practices if you’re going to be successful.”
For him that starts with having the right stock, having good replenishment and getting rid of products that aren’t selling. “You need to have brightly lit stores, good marketing, good personnel, good customer service practice. All these add up to a good retail experience.”
On a recent road trip, Franks said, he was surprised by some adult stores’ practices. “They were cutting prices, which was not benefiting any of them. They should raise the retail experience, not lower the prices. That’s what we do. It works great for us.”
Part of that experience, he noted, is personal appearances by porn stars. With stores in five states, Castle does about a dozen signings every month.
The “retail experience” is something many people strive to perfect.
According to Tom Berger, CEO of Orlando, Fla.’s Fairvilla Megastore, “Brick and mortar has the advantage [over Internet marketers] that we create a shopping experience. But we have to create some excitement, give customers a reason to buy.”
Fairvilla, he said, is “a company into event marketing. We’ll take an item or an activity, and we’ll blend our merchandising and our sales into one large event, and then we’ll try to create some excitement and boost sales that way. We try to show our customers a good time,” he added, pointing to the pirate ship they built in one of their three big stores to promote the movie Pirates.
Jennifer Downey, co-owner of the nine-store Ambience chain in northeast Ohio, also uses events to keep her stores’ name before the public. They recently sponsored the world-premiere of the indie comedy The Oh in Ohio in Cleveland, where it was filmed.
“We always do a lot of advertising,” she said, “but we look for special things that can get our name out there.” She added that she also relies on sales incentives in her individual stores to keep those registers ringing.
Ellen Barnard, owner of A Woman’s Touch in Madison, Wis., is a firm believer in event marketing. “We do a lot of educational programs. We do a Sextoys 101 class that’s free. It gets the people in, they spend an hour and a half learning, and they almost always buy afterwards,” she said.
She conceded that “we’re a really different store, not a typical adult retailer,” which makes it somewhat easier to get involved in community events like neighborhood festivals. But, she added, “we definitely do sales. In June we did a sale because we saw things were slowing down on our e-lube product, and that doubled and tripled our lube sales that month. We did a special on a line of DVDs one month because the distributor gave us a deal on them.
“We also have a newsletter — that’s the way we announce our sales — in a paper version and an email version," Barnard said. "It’s a great way to publicize things.”
For Donna Tietz of Video Dimensions in the Chicago area, the magic word is: “Advertise. When we feel we’re having problems, we advertise. We’ve put ourselves in phone books and magazines and everything. We’re in the northwest side of Chicago, and I have people coming all the way from the south side and from Wisconsin because of advertising.”
She calls her store “a very large mom and pop, with 35,000 adult videos. So we have to kind of promote the adult in the adult magazines.” But she’s always on the lookout for new advertising outlets, like neighborhood bulletins. She added, “There’s always a new place to advertise. We’ve found that after we do a new venue, our business picks up a little bit.”
Dean Pagano is president of Risque Business, a company with seven video stores (four in Philadelphia, three in south New Jersey) and three Club Risque gentlemen’s clubs. He is well aware of the value of keeping your name before the public.
“When business slows,” he said, “we advertise more. More radio, more print ads, more cross-promotion with our gentlemen’s clubs. We’ve done billboards in the past. It’s going to chop into your profits, but advertising gets your customer in.”
He also believes in promotions: free memberships, Ladies Nights, 20 percent off all novelties, Buy 2 Get 1 Free DVDs, an H-2 Hummer with the store locations on it that cruises the city — “always some kind of hook to get the customer in.”
David Betesh, CEO of another Pennsylvania-based chain, the eight-store Excitement Video, took a tip from an AVN article and began to have in-store appearances. Bringing customers face to face with their favorite porn stars, he feels, creates the kind of consumer good will that online retailers can’t provide.
Betesh emphasized that sound business practices, such as buying more carefully, are the best shield against slowdowns. “You have to scrutinize what you’re purchasing a little more," he said. "Take a little more time to look at everything that’s available and decide, well, am I going to put my $20 into this new release, is it going to bring me the return on investment that I want?”
He has noticed, with some surprise, he said, that customers in his stores have begun to seek out better product. “Before, anything you would put out would rent. Now people know the production companies; they know there’s quality product out there. They know that there’s stuff they don’t want to rent. Buying better, and buying better product certainly helps,” Betesh stated.
Betesh also suggests that video stores add a novelty section if they don’t already have one. His own sex toy sections have increased from 25 percent to one-third in recent years. “And the better selection I have, the more business I do in that department. If DVD sales or rentals are down, try to increase business in other areas in the store,” he said.
That takes everything back to the basics of a “good retail experience,” or, as DK Wilds’ Coverdale boiled it down: “meeting your customers’ needs and making sure they leave feeling satisfied with the experience they’ve had in your store.”
