Stock up for Wimbledon

Harj Dhasee, one of our seven expert retailer columnists, focuses on how you can make Wimbledon work for you.

With the Wimbledon tennis tournament about to start there’s a huge opportunity for retailers to make a mint by selling strawberries and cream.

Strawberries and cream are a food traditionally associated with this tennis tournament and we always bring in a massive range of strawberries (about 150-200 punnets) on Friday night with the intention of selling them out by the end of the weekend.

If you get it right you can really feed off the buzz around Wimbledon – you can say to your customers not just, “Isn’t the weather nice,” but “Did you see Andy Murray’s match?”

It gives you something in common with your customers. It’s a real chance to tap into the summer opportunity and position yourself as a friend of your shoppers. 

We can order our strawberries on Thursday and have them in the shop by Friday afternoon. As long as you get the stock rotation right you can treat strawberries as an ambient product to a certain extent. So we will create a big, high-visibility display that’s not refrigerated. 

How well it works depends on the theatre you create in the shop. If you sell strawberries from local farms, make sure you let your customers know.

Go big and bold with your display – it really is an impulse purchase and you need to get people’s attention, so make your display stand out.

Have linked deals – we offer strawberries (£2.50 a punnet), cream and meringues for under £5. We calculate it so that we make £1.50 profit per linked deal.

Offer luxury items for customers that have more cash to spend – we sell strawberries from local farms for £3.50 a punnet.

Rotate the stock every two hours between the display and the chiller to extend shelf life, and refrigerate overnight. 

There will be some waste – that’s the nature of the beast. Accept you will have to throw away 10-15 punnets. It is still well worth it.

Weather is key – people will buy more strawberries if it is sunny so check the forecast every day.