Reid Cycles founder, James Reid, has given a great interview with Bicycles Network Australia.
Check out a snippet of the interview below:
'Christopher Jones: Reid reduced the outlets to two retail stores and is now expanding, what has changed? What key differences are there now that you feel that a retail store is the right approach.
James Reid: That’s correct, now we have 4 stores including online, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide. We firmly believe to be a national brand, we need locations to touch, feel and test ride our bikes in all major capital cities. It’s what our customers want.
With our renewed strategy of smaller footprint stores and focusing on Reid products, it means our stores are much easier and leaner to operate. I would say in terms of weekly overheads we could have 3 smaller footprint stores for the same cost as 1 of the old larger footprint stores.
Having interstate locations with a lot of staff was very difficult and costly to manage staff we found. We are very lucky that a high number of our remaining staff are very loyal, passionate and experienced, most of our managers have been with us for 4-6 years. They are the heart and soul of our business.
We have developed a modified profit share program for our store managers and strong incentive program for all staff. This is great because we are all working towards the same goal of growing the Reid brand and reputation.
We see our store managers as running their own smaller business and want them to prosper along with the brand success. We are now keeping an eye out for locations in Perth and Brisbane.'
Read the whole interview with James here.