RaceTrack’s unique business model and eye-popping stores have long made it an outlier in Scottish local retailing – but that hasn’t stopped it picking up four SLR Awards this year.
By Antony Begley
In terms of the sheer shopper experience, there is simply nothing else in UK local retailing quite like shopping a RaceTrack store. In little more than a decade, the family-run business has torn up the rulebook on what a convenience store is and does.
The Sud family chose instead to start from scratch and reinvent local retailing on their own – spectacular – terms. The playbook they ultimately created majors on what a marketer would probably call ‘experiential shopping’. If you’ve ever visited a RaceTrack store, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
It’s an assault on the senses, but in the best possible way. Most people simply say ‘wow’ as they walk in. Including the judges for this year’s SLR Awards, which goes some way to explaining why the group collected no fewer than four awards in June: Off-Trade Retailer of the Year, Smokeless Alternatives Retailer of the Year, Soft Drinks Retailer of the Year and, not for the first time, #ThinkSmart Innovation Retailer of the Year.
Style and substance
There’s a lot to unpack with four separate award wins, but let’s start with the bigger picture. There’s no question that RaceTrack has a style all of its own. It’s big, it’s bold, it’s bright and it’s loud. But while the stores major on style, they also deliver on substance.
Yes, visiting a RaceTrack store is an experience that stays with you, but dig a little deeper and it’s not hard to see that there’s a sophisticated business model at work here. When they were building this fast-growing chain of stores, husband-and-wife team Vikas and Shamly Sud and their sons Guna and Rits absolutely had a strategy in mind, over and above the commitment to an elevated in-store experience.
They clearly wanted to build destination stores. Stores that give customers unique and compelling reasons to visit. Reasons to pass another store to get to a RaceTrack store. Every store in the group is packed with stuff you won’t see anywhere else, certainly not under one roof. They were never trying to build a business that would sell a traditional convenience range. They wanted Havana cigar humidors, 70 flavours of slush, liquid nitrogen desserts, ozone-technology launderettes and thousands of vaping and pouch SKUs – and that’s before you get to all the imported stuff that dominates whole categories in-store: Japanese soft drinks, American candy, Korean booze, Mexican crisps, Nigerian Coke. The list goes on and on.
You may have noticed that the vast majority of these unique or rare products carry very hefty margins. There’s method in the RaceTrack madness.
Similarly, there’s a big focus on the Tubbees desserts and Hoagies food-to-go brands, both sub-brands of RaceTrack, and both very much on the money in terms of modern consumption trends – and, again, delivering very high margins.
Deranged range
That commitment to differentiated ranges was what helped RaceTrack Strathclyde pick up three awards. The store is only a few years old but benefited from a major refresh last year and is one of the star performers in the group. Sitting at the heart of Strathclyde University, it’s typically rammed all day long.
That creates its own problems. Guna readily admits that it’s difficult to keep the store as pristine as the family like their stores to be when it’s getting hammered all day long. But that’s a nice problem to have.
Across Soft Drinks, Vaping and Off-Trade, the model is fundamentally the same and was equally appealing to the judges in all three categories. Essentially, we’re talking about a strong core range of products you’d expect to see in most stores but, on top of that, there’s a mountain of the sort of lines that make the store special and draw customers from miles away. Endless shelves of imported products most customers will never have seen before.
Many of them carry premium prices (and margins), but that doesn’t appear to deter shoppers. The extra they have to pay seems to be worth it for that elevated experience. Nothing is cheap these days, so why not pay a small premium for a genuinely new experience or an interesting product?
Everything is beautifully presented too and, in the case of the Smokeless Alternatives category, there’s a range that a city-centre specialist vape shop couldn’t compete with. And pricing that they definitely couldn’t match.
Tech time
The fourth award – the #ThinkSmart Innovation Award – went to RaceTrack Wishaw, which plays a major role in the development of RaceTrack’s loyalty app. With thousands of users, the app is already in great shape, but the latest plan sees the tech and data guys back at RaceTrack HQ starting to dig into analytics and sophisticated digital marketing techniques to drive footfall, sales and profits in a way that no other local retailers that I’m aware of are doing.
The app permits segmented, tailored marketing and is already driving significant uplifts for the business – and the team are only just getting started. The potential for the app to play an increasingly important role in the business moving forward is huge as deeper relationships are developed with individual customers and more is learned about their tastes and preferences.
Give it a go
It typically becomes more and more difficult to maintain momentum and standards across a business as it grows, but the signs are clear that Shamly, Vikas, Guna and Rits are doing all the right things to keep the business racing down the track at breakneck speed. They certainly don’t miss many opportunities and they still seem eager to give anything a go, a refreshing change from the natural conservatism and reluctance to be too experimental that tends to set in when businesses reach a certain size. Long may it continue.
