As credit continues to crunch and public sector purse-strings tighten, it's essential that museums make the most of their merchandise. But are our heritage retail outlets doing the business or are they, to coin a phrase, all over the shop?
With increasing numbers of "staycationers" pursuing the cheaper thrills of UK-based holidays, museums must persuade them to see it, do it and then buy the T-shirt, catalogue, or souvenir mug on their way out.
According to John Prescott of the Retail Matters consultancy, we've been here before and all it takes is a little attention to detail when it comes to appropriate product lines, sensible stock levels and old-fashioned customer service.
"We had similar economic circumstances in 1991 and a lot of museums, faced with local and central government cuts, suddenly realised they were supporting their shops when it should have been the other way round. As many realised then, the big problem has always been getting money out of visitors."
The trouble often begins, says Prescott, when well-meaning museum curators stock shops with non-commercial items in non-viable quantities.
"Good aesthetic input ensures a shop properly represents a museum, but someone going off on a personal tangent isn't helpful," says Prescott.
"The biggest single difference between a museum shop and high-street retailing is level of stock. Quite often, museums order huge amounts of printed material that may have seemed a good deal at the time, but will actually just go out of date as the staples rust.
"One museum recently spent an absolute fortune on a new painting and proudly put it on several thousand postcards. Unfortunately, it wasn't actually of any interest to the public who wanted something much more commercial. Not referring to the customer in any retail environment is a recipe for disaster."
Knowledgeable, approachable staff who don't mind talking - and, more essentially, selling - to people are a must. A shop should also be part of the overall museum experience and not an afterthought with a till, adds Prescott.
"You should be able to walk into a shop, remove your blindfold and instantly know what the museum's collection and core activity is all about by simply looking around. The product has to be relevant; it doesn't have to be something that's been specially made as the vast majority of museums can't invest huge amounts in exclusive lines. But something appropriate, attractively merchandised, can work wonders."
Relevant giftware and souvenirs are a trick of the trade at Beamish, the open-air museum in County Durham where the shop sells locally-made products as well as lines that reflect the north east region, its people, food and heritage.
"Beamish is almost entirely reliant on gen erating income from visitors in order to survive," says director Richard Evans, who reveals the museum's retail turnover exceeds £500,000.
"About 98 per cent of our operating costs of more than £4m have to come from admissions, retail, catering, events and functions. Takings are up - at least double digit in percentage terms - but we have noticed that retail may be more of a discretionary spend and the increase has not been as dramatic as the increase in visitors."
Life is not easy for an independent, stand-alone retail operation, he adds.
"Without the buying power of a larger, multi-site museum or heritage organisation, we struggle in terms of overheads and buying power for stock. Our costs are higher, so our margins can suffer."
This is a common problem for smaller museums aiming to run successful shops, says retail and marketing specialist Selina Fellows.
"Larger organisations can run their activities as profit centres, but local authority-led museums, for example, do not have much purchasing power and are also bound by local government pay rates. Someone who has worked in the sector for 30 years is obviously going to be more expensive to employ in a museum shop than a sales assistant hired from the high street.
"Independents often don't have a huge amount of capital behind them and retail is increasingly becoming a tertiary [visitor] spend, behind admission charges and catering, in some of them."
Customer service
In the current economic climate, museums must know who their increasing numbers of visitors are and the extent of their spending power in order to tailor their shops accordingly.
"With the relatively strong euro it's worth bearing in mind that overseas tourists might be looking for a different kind of gift from that sought by British families on a day trip," says Fellows.
"Most museums boast mission statements embracing access and outreach and that welcoming ethos should flow through a fully-integrated visitor and retail experience with strong service levels throughout."
Enthusiastic retail staff can make a huge difference she says. "I genuinely sympathise with the places where over-stretched, well-meaning people often have to manage all the customer service while carrying out part-time curatorial duties and running the education programme," says Fellows.
"It's not easy if they're busy and don't have the right experience, but good training can make a real difference."
To that end, the Association for Cultural Enterprises (ACE), which promotes best practice in heritage commerce, organises study days which include courses on successful retailing, looking at how museums can make money out of everything from gift shops to picture libraries.
ACE also recognises best practice and rewards innovative gift ideas - its Product of the Year award winners for 2009 include the London Transport Museum's moquette bags and furniture, Culture and Sport Glasgow's Spitfire Snowglobe and the Royal Yacht Britannia's children's jigsaws.
Meanwhile, choice items - ranging from a London manhole cover doormat made from recycled tyres to Tracey Emin's "dishwasher-safe" My Favourite Bird bone china plate - are available via CultureLabel, a chic and cheerful "online boutique" featuring a range of gift ideas from museums and galleries such as the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts.
Online opportunities
"Museums websites often fail to recognise the customer journey and the shop can often be hidden away," says CultureLabel director Peter Tullin.
"Research shows the online sales are, on average, one to three per cent of museum retail business compared to near 20 per cent for other sectors. So we decided to turn it on its head, bring all the shops together at the front of a site to allow people to buy and then to delve into the cultural side of things, rather than the other way round."
"Brand spaces" allow museums to advertise their collections and services and sell tickets and memberships, says Tullin, who believes a purely online option could be the way forward for many institutions.
"The internet lowers the cost of distributing products; less than a third of hub museums have online shops, which seems very low to me," he says. "Others simply pay lip service to online retailing and just expect people to use it. In difficult times, some difficult decisions might have to be taken."
He singles out Tate, an early signatory to CultureLabel, as a retailer that sets the right tone. Revelling in its reputation as a superbrand, turnover in Tate's physical retail outlets remains robust across its four sites. Tate generates around 60 per cent of its own inc-ome on top of its government funding through a combination of retail, events, restaurants/cafes and ticket sales.
Online, it takes advantage of viral marketing and social network sites, says Tullin: "Tate creates just as much collateral online about its shops as it does about its collections. That's an indication of where things are going."
John Holt is a freelance journalist
With increasing numbers of "staycationers" pursuing the cheaper thrills of UK-based holidays, museums must persuade them to see it, do it and then buy the T-shirt, catalogue, or souvenir mug on their way out.
According to John Prescott of the Retail Matters consultancy, we've been here before and all it takes is a little attention to detail when it comes to appropriate product lines, sensible stock levels and old-fashioned customer service.
"We had similar economic circumstances in 1991 and a lot of museums, faced with local and central government cuts, suddenly realised they were supporting their shops when it should have been the other way round. As many realised then, the big problem has always been getting money out of visitors."
The trouble often begins, says Prescott, when well-meaning museum curators stock shops with non-commercial items in non-viable quantities.
"Good aesthetic input ensures a shop properly represents a museum, but someone going off on a personal tangent isn't helpful," says Prescott.
"The biggest single difference between a museum shop and high-street retailing is level of stock. Quite often, museums order huge amounts of printed material that may have seemed a good deal at the time, but will actually just go out of date as the staples rust.
"One museum recently spent an absolute fortune on a new painting and proudly put it on several thousand postcards. Unfortunately, it wasn't actually of any interest to the public who wanted something much more commercial. Not referring to the customer in any retail environment is a recipe for disaster."
Knowledgeable, approachable staff who don't mind talking - and, more essentially, selling - to people are a must. A shop should also be part of the overall museum experience and not an afterthought with a till, adds Prescott.
"You should be able to walk into a shop, remove your blindfold and instantly know what the museum's collection and core activity is all about by simply looking around. The product has to be relevant; it doesn't have to be something that's been specially made as the vast majority of museums can't invest huge amounts in exclusive lines. But something appropriate, attractively merchandised, can work wonders."
Relevant giftware and souvenirs are a trick of the trade at Beamish, the open-air museum in County Durham where the shop sells locally-made products as well as lines that reflect the north east region, its people, food and heritage.
"Beamish is almost entirely reliant on gen erating income from visitors in order to survive," says director Richard Evans, who reveals the museum's retail turnover exceeds £500,000.
"About 98 per cent of our operating costs of more than £4m have to come from admissions, retail, catering, events and functions. Takings are up - at least double digit in percentage terms - but we have noticed that retail may be more of a discretionary spend and the increase has not been as dramatic as the increase in visitors."
Life is not easy for an independent, stand-alone retail operation, he adds.
"Without the buying power of a larger, multi-site museum or heritage organisation, we struggle in terms of overheads and buying power for stock. Our costs are higher, so our margins can suffer."
This is a common problem for smaller museums aiming to run successful shops, says retail and marketing specialist Selina Fellows.
"Larger organisations can run their activities as profit centres, but local authority-led museums, for example, do not have much purchasing power and are also bound by local government pay rates. Someone who has worked in the sector for 30 years is obviously going to be more expensive to employ in a museum shop than a sales assistant hired from the high street.
"Independents often don't have a huge amount of capital behind them and retail is increasingly becoming a tertiary [visitor] spend, behind admission charges and catering, in some of them."
Customer service
In the current economic climate, museums must know who their increasing numbers of visitors are and the extent of their spending power in order to tailor their shops accordingly.
"With the relatively strong euro it's worth bearing in mind that overseas tourists might be looking for a different kind of gift from that sought by British families on a day trip," says Fellows.
"Most museums boast mission statements embracing access and outreach and that welcoming ethos should flow through a fully-integrated visitor and retail experience with strong service levels throughout."
Enthusiastic retail staff can make a huge difference she says. "I genuinely sympathise with the places where over-stretched, well-meaning people often have to manage all the customer service while carrying out part-time curatorial duties and running the education programme," says Fellows.
"It's not easy if they're busy and don't have the right experience, but good training can make a real difference."
To that end, the Association for Cultural Enterprises (ACE), which promotes best practice in heritage commerce, organises study days which include courses on successful retailing, looking at how museums can make money out of everything from gift shops to picture libraries.
ACE also recognises best practice and rewards innovative gift ideas - its Product of the Year award winners for 2009 include the London Transport Museum's moquette bags and furniture, Culture and Sport Glasgow's Spitfire Snowglobe and the Royal Yacht Britannia's children's jigsaws.
Meanwhile, choice items - ranging from a London manhole cover doormat made from recycled tyres to Tracey Emin's "dishwasher-safe" My Favourite Bird bone china plate - are available via CultureLabel, a chic and cheerful "online boutique" featuring a range of gift ideas from museums and galleries such as the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts.
Online opportunities
"Museums websites often fail to recognise the customer journey and the shop can often be hidden away," says CultureLabel director Peter Tullin.
"Research shows the online sales are, on average, one to three per cent of museum retail business compared to near 20 per cent for other sectors. So we decided to turn it on its head, bring all the shops together at the front of a site to allow people to buy and then to delve into the cultural side of things, rather than the other way round."
"Brand spaces" allow museums to advertise their collections and services and sell tickets and memberships, says Tullin, who believes a purely online option could be the way forward for many institutions.
"The internet lowers the cost of distributing products; less than a third of hub museums have online shops, which seems very low to me," he says. "Others simply pay lip service to online retailing and just expect people to use it. In difficult times, some difficult decisions might have to be taken."
He singles out Tate, an early signatory to CultureLabel, as a retailer that sets the right tone. Revelling in its reputation as a superbrand, turnover in Tate's physical retail outlets remains robust across its four sites. Tate generates around 60 per cent of its own inc-ome on top of its government funding through a combination of retail, events, restaurants/cafes and ticket sales.
Online, it takes advantage of viral marketing and social network sites, says Tullin: "Tate creates just as much collateral online about its shops as it does about its collections. That's an indication of where things are going."
John Holt is a freelance journalist
"We don't want shoppers thinking they've seen it all before"
Each of the 10 museums in Ironbridge Gorge has a dedicated shop that reflects its theme.
"Our new retail strategy exploits the uniqueness of all the collections, which is something we haven't done so well in the past," says Anna Brennand, deputy CEO and director of finance and resources of the Ironbridge Gorge Museums Trust.
"For example, the Blists Hill site has its own foundry and we have introduced more interpretation of the products and processes so that visitors can forge a relationship with an item as it's being made before purchasing a unique bespoke gift."
Ironbridge also houses a number of creative tenants and the museum has founded its own Made in the Gorge brand to bring a wide range of products together (such as Coalbrookedale Museum of Iron's cast-iron pokers) in a marketing strategy that ties new and old industries together.
New products and presentation styles make for a successful retail experience, according to Brennand, who says that Ironbridge's retail revenues are up on last year.
"Some museums you can visit year after year and the shops always look the same," she says. "We aim to change the product range on a season-by-season basis as any other retailer would. We have a lot of repeat visitors - some who come purely for the shops - and we don't want them thinking they've seen it all before."
Each of the 10 museums in Ironbridge Gorge has a dedicated shop that reflects its theme.
"Our new retail strategy exploits the uniqueness of all the collections, which is something we haven't done so well in the past," says Anna Brennand, deputy CEO and director of finance and resources of the Ironbridge Gorge Museums Trust.
"For example, the Blists Hill site has its own foundry and we have introduced more interpretation of the products and processes so that visitors can forge a relationship with an item as it's being made before purchasing a unique bespoke gift."
Ironbridge also houses a number of creative tenants and the museum has founded its own Made in the Gorge brand to bring a wide range of products together (such as Coalbrookedale Museum of Iron's cast-iron pokers) in a marketing strategy that ties new and old industries together.
New products and presentation styles make for a successful retail experience, according to Brennand, who says that Ironbridge's retail revenues are up on last year.
"Some museums you can visit year after year and the shops always look the same," she says. "We aim to change the product range on a season-by-season basis as any other retailer would. We have a lot of repeat visitors - some who come purely for the shops - and we don't want them thinking they've seen it all before."
Links
Trading Up, a Museums Association one day conference on generating income, 6th October, London
www.culturelabel.com
Trading Up, a Museums Association one day conference on generating income, 6th October, London
www.culturelabel.com
