Customers were asking us for PCs and we had two options: either to sell major brand names or build our own
Customers were asking us for PCs and we had two options: either to sell major brand names or build our own. We decided to build our own.We had a ready market, and we felt we weren’t in any way diversifying from our core business – it was the same thing. After a year I found some really good software in America and started to import it. Then we grew into a mail-order company.In April 1997, we started building PCs We had a customer base of around 300,000 and 15 stores.
A lot of our customers were asking for us to supply PCs; we sold software, printers, scanners, and it was the final piece of the jigsaw.
I started out cold-calling, knocking on doors on an industrial estate, selling anything to do with computers. His company, the UK’s fastest growing over the past four years, now has 350 employees with an annual turnover of more than pounds 100m. He has also written a book, `Serve to Win’, and is launching a computer magazine, `Internet Monthly’
MY BIGGEST mistake was to lose sight of our core competency and move into manufacturing, after we had been going for seven years. Steve Bennett, 33, founded Software Warehouse in his early 20s after being made redundant from his job with a small computer dealer. We moan about high prices but almost certainly will refuse to pay the price required to lower them.For Wal-Mart and its like, Edwardsville, Illinois, may have been a pushover Edwardsville, Mid Glamorgan, would not be..
Britain is a nationof city dwellers, who wish we lived in the country. But the suburbs, the malls and the Wal-Marts march relentlessly on Across America there are thousands of Edwardsvilles. In Edwardsville they remember the downtown drugstores of a generation ago, and shed small tears for places like Auerbach’s, the main street clothing store where the local hotshots used to go. Booker is a cash and carry chain that also could be in its sights. But even then there will be cultural obstacles.For all the current nostalgia for a smalltown America, crushed beneath the mega-stores’ jackboot, not enough people are really care enough to halt the process.
It is likely to repeat its tactics in Germany and buy existing chains, with Asda or Safeway widely tipped. The half-dozen operating or under construction here are likely to be the last.Reducing traffic and reviving the inner cities are the watchwords Another watchword, unfortunately, is recession. The US may defy gravity, but the British economy is stalling.For these reasons, if and when Wal-Mart does cross the Channel, it is unlikely to set up from scratch, and Britain’s green fields will be safe. Planning permission is difficult to obtain, and development doctrines have turned against the type of out-of-town hypermarkets in which Wal-Mart specialises. The high cost of scarce land is one often-overlooked reason for those “rip-off” prices paid by the retail customer. Even in the US, where the discount market was increasingly saturated, Wal-Mart seemed to lose its way after the death of “Mr Sam”.