Smoker Friendly creates a welcoming environment for smokers and vapers while it plans to grow its liquor locations and growler stations.
By Stephanie Crets
There can be a stigma to buying cigarettes in today’s world, but Smoker Friendly creates an open, pleasant environment that makes customers feel welcome. “We provide a very bright environment – one where you don’t feel ashamed coming in and buying your cigarettes,” Co-owner and Marketing Director Regan Bartley says. “If you’re a regular, our employees know what you want, and they’ll carry on and joke around with you. Our slogan is ‘clean, friendly, pleasant,’ but our employees make Smoker Friendly what it is.”
Smoker Friendly’s 41 locations are mainly dispersed across West Virginia, but it also has five stores in Ohio, one in Virginia and one in Maryland. The company has a couple acquisitions in the works and hopes to see some growth in its store numbers in 2017. In the meantime, Smoker Friendly is focusing on its rewards program for its loyal customer base. Launched at the beginning of October, the rewards program is free to sign up and allows customers to accumulate points for free products while also entering store sweepstakes.
“I’ve created one big program with so many benefits that the success rate has been seeing huge increases in sales,” Bartley says. “We’ve created a strong program to keep customers back in the stores.”
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TOPS Friendly Markets has served the Northeast for generations with supermarkets centered around customer service.
By Chris Petersen
For generations, TOPS Friendly Markets has been the local favorite throughout upstate New York and the surrounding area, and chairman and CEO Frank Curci says the company is committed to holding onto that position for many years to come. “As a New York state-owned and operated company, our vision is to be your friendly neighborhood store that has what you want while saving you time and money,” Curci says.
Keeping the promises it makes to its customers each and every day is paramount for TOPS and crucial for its continued success, and that has been the status quo for the company ever since before the first modern TOPS supermarket opened in 1962 in Niagara Falls, N.Y. The company’s roots date back even further, to the early 1920s when Ferrante Castellani moved his family to Niagara Falls from a small village in Italy. In Niagara Falls, Castellani opened his first grocery store, and his sons Armand and Alfred soon opened two more under the same name of Great Bear Market.
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BrandSource and its independent retail members work together to improve operations and provide better choices to consumers.
By Eric Slack
What started as a buying group in 1969 has become so much more for a diverse array of retailers. Today, BrandSource is more of a member services organization that serves retailers of many stripes and helps level the playing field so they can compete.
BrandSource’s roots extend back to a 1969 discussion among a group of appliance and electronics retailers, who saw the opportunity to get better pricing and terms by pooling their orders together. Those southern California retailers teamed up to form Associated Volume Buyers (AVB).
“Our founders got together because they saw they could get better deals from manufacturers by working together,” Chief Marketing Officer John White says. “Now we are a member-owned organization that works on behalf of our members with manufacturers, vendors and suppliers to get better prices, while also helping members to do better business and generate more business in their stores.”
The organization has grown to northern California, the Northwest and around the country, creating 17 different regions and locally managing regional operations to target the products each region sells. In 1994, the group became the first appliance and electronics buying group to sign a national mattress manufacturer, Simmons. This began the group’s entry into furniture.
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Foot Locker stores are designed to engage consumers in finding shoes that make their statement.
By Tim O’Connor
Dick Johnson enjoys standing at the top of the escalator at the entrance to Foot Locker’s new flagship store on 34th Street in New York City. From that vantage point, he can soak in the comments from shoppers as they walk around the 10,000-square-foot retail space and marvel at how the modern design tells the story of each brand’s shoes.
“You can tell they love the space,” the CEO of Foot Locker says. “You see it with the amount of product they are buying.”
Customer engagement was a core tenet of the company even before Johnson arrived at Foot Locker. In 1997, Johnson was working for catalog athletic footwear company Eastbay when Foot Locker – then known as Woolworth’s – purchased the Wisconsin-based company.
Foot Locker has changed dramatically in the nearly 20 years since, Johnson says. After being absorbed into the company, Johnson at first stuck with the catalog side of the business and had little interaction with the brick-and-mortar stores. That changed in 2007 when he took over the European operations, which were firmly rooted in physical locations.
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The 11th annual Sports Licensing and Tailgate Show takes place Jan. 17-19, 2017, at the Las Vegas Convention Center. This will be the largest show to date with nearly 400 exhibiting licensees, offering the latest fan gear to expand the product offerings of retailers. Exhibitors represent all of the professional and collegiate leagues and teams and will be showcasing merchandise in every possible product category – from toys and games to apparel to pet products and much more. Check out some of the products you might see at the SLTShow below. For more information about the show, check out our preview.
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Steve Jackson Games focuses on expansions and licensed products for the Munchkin card game series while it revives tried-and-true fan favorites.
By Stephanie Crets
If you have a warped sense of humor and enjoy tabletop and card games, odds are you’ll enjoy the slate of games offered by Steve Jackson Games. The company has roughly 20 games and more than 100 titles in its current catalog. That can change every year as some games go out of print, while new ones are created and old ones are brought back. But its classic game series is Munchkin.
“Part of the reason Munchkins has been so successful for us is embracing that sense of humor and running off on crazy tangents and having lots of fun with it,” CEO Phil Reed says. “The silliness and the cartooning style really excite the fans.”
Steve Jackson Games keeps the excitement brewing by constantly announcing new cards or expansions for the Munchkin series, such as Mars Attacks, Judge Dredd, and zombie and holiday-themed expansions. “We try to turn the game around to shock and surprise the players,” Reed notes.
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Always looking to stay ahead of the curve, Victoria Fine Foods creates premium pasta sauces that meet the lifestyle needs of its consumers.
By Eric Slack
Founded in 1929, Victoria Fine Foods remains a Brooklyn-based company known as the leading slow kettle-cooked pasta sauce manufacturer in the United States. Victoria still uses only a handful of fresh ingredients for its specialty Italian sauces and condiments, and traditional slow kettle-cooking methods to ensure rich flavor and a homemade taste.
Committed to longstanding values of quality, honesty, authenticity and community, Victoria believes that ingredients come first. These values extend back to the company’s founding family, Italian immigrants who came to Brooklyn nearly a century ago. Although they sold the company to new ownership in 2011, the fundamental qualities that made Victoria Fine Foods remain intact.
“We have been professionalizing the company and taking this dominant Northeast-known brand across the country,” CEO Tim Shanley says. “The brand has a cult-like following in the Northeast because of its superior product and commitment to insightful innovation. Victoria has more than four times the Facebook following of our nearest premium pasta sauce-only brand, and we are only distributed in about 25 percent of the country at this point. We have maintained the authenticity of our recipes while instilling modern sensibilities into the business.”
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Sedlak listens to retailers’ supply chain needs and recommends effective methods without bias.
Retailers face increasingly complex challenges in their supply chains to keep up with consumer demands for an “anytime, anywhere” shopping experience. That requires a seamless mix of mobile, ecommerce and brick-and-mortar solutions along with omnichannel fulfillment. Developing and maintaining the optimal strategies, facilities, operations and systems to meet these challenges can be overwhelming for many retailers. For nearly 60 years, retailers of all sizes and types have trusted Sedlak to find the right answers for their distribution and logistics needs.
“We’ve got a very rich history in retail,” Principal Patrick Sedlak points out. The firm has helped all of the major names in retailing as well as niche retailers, and covers the spectrum of brick-and-mortar and direct-to-consumer companies. “We work across the supply chain –sourcing, inventory and physical distribution,” Sedlak adds. The company also provides services to wholesalers, manufacturers, third-party logistics (3PL) providers and healthcare companies.
Sedlak helps its clients with everything related to the four walls of a distribution center – its location, layout, labor, size, material-handling equipment, inventory, and warehouse management and control systems. And after decades in the business, “We’re the most trusted advisor in the physical distribution business for retailers in the marketplace today,” Sedlak asserts.
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