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Buying ingenuity |
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Throughout
the 30s Woolies buyers showed huge ingenuity in sourcing new products
and developing innovative displays.
From tinned peaches to broken biscuits, from gramophone needles to garden shears, from flowering bulbs to light bulbs. Among the most surprising best sellers were feathers (used to enhance ladies' hats and gowns) at 3D each. The window display (with a "bird" made of individual feathers) must have taken many hours to build. |
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The Buyers used window displays to stimulate demand for their wares. Sometimes they would promote an every day item like a mop, coat hanger or hosepipe to give it a life of its own. These window displays captured customers' imaginations and stimulated big increases in sales. |
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| The best innovation of the 1930s, was to promote goods manufactured in a given town in that town's Woolworths. | ||||
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Store
Managers worked with the factory to set up elaborate window displays,
often to coincide with a local carnival or wakes week holiday.
Our favourite is the window designed by colleagues in the Rochdale and Bolton areas promoting Lancashire cotton. The mill owner provided raw cotton and a huge loom to supplement the product displays. The window sign read "You weave it, we sell it ... help us to help you". Not only did these windows deliver good sales, but they promoted a lot of goodwill between Woolworths and local people. It is one of the reasons that within a generation of the first opening, everyone assumed (correctly) that Woolies was a British company at heart. |
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Opening
gambit - transforming the High Street Flotation
on the London Stock Exchange |
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