Reinventing retail

The Sud family in Glasgow have claimed the coveted Scottish Local Retailer of the Year 2025 title and it doesn’t take long wandering around their sensory overload store in Wishaw to see why.

By Antony Begley

Walk through the door at Racetrack Wishaw and you immediately know you’re in for something special. It’s not so much a convenience store as an assault on the senses, all five of them at once. It’s a mind-blowing retail experience and, to be fair to the judges, the standard response as they walked through the door was simply ‘wow’. To put that in perspective, every judge on our extensive panel has spent a lifetime in retail, been there, done that and bought the T-shirt. To extract a ‘wow’ from that audience is no mean feat.

There are many retailers in Scotland doing fantastic work and pushing the boundaries of what local retailing is and means, but it’s probably not unfair to say that nobody is pushing as hard as the Sud family that run the Racetrack business.

Shamly, Vikas, Guna and Rits Sud have spent the last decade or so taking local retailing in an entirely new direction. Wishaw was the 11^th store in the group (there have been more since) and each new store pushes harder and further. Wishaw is undoubtedly the most spectacular yet, due in part to the fact that it’s a huge store – 4,500sq ft – so it allowed the family to bring all their brands together under the same roof for the first time.

Guna breaks it down like this: “Racetrack is our standard convenience retailing brand, Hoagies is our food-to-go brand, Tubbies Dessert Lab is our dessert brand and SpeedQueen is our launderette brand.”

These brands appear in other Racetrack stores, but they had never all appeared together on the same site. “We have these brands in our other stores but Wishaw gave us the opportunity to have all four in the same space for the first time,” explains Guna. “Wishaw is basically our standard store concept on steroids. It was really exciting.”

And ‘exciting’ is exactly the right word to describe what the store is all about. It’s experiential, it’s sensory overload, it’s where-do-I-look-now. Frankly, it’s a bit mental.

That experiential approach to retail is built into the DNA of the entire store and it affects everything from ranging and merchandising to layout and décor. Forget the rulebook. We won’t be needing that.

Take ranging, for example. Most stores build a range that meets the needs of most of their customers and tries to strike a balance between factors like rate of sale, profit margins and NPD. Racetrack simply doesn’t follow that model. For a start, a lot of what you find in Racetrack Wishaw you won’t find anywhere else, full stop. Shelves and shelves of Japanese and US imports create an entirely new retail experience. It’s exotic, it’s weird, it’s alluring, it’s engaging. It’s TikTok or Instagram brought to life in convenience store form.

Secondly, the range is there to create an atmosphere, an experience, a vibe. It’s not there simply to sell stock. Clearly, it helps if the stuff does sell but the primary goal of the range is to deliver experience. From personal experience and with my characteristic heavy dose of cynicism, I’ve stood and looked at walls of Japanese soft drinks with not a word of English on the cans – not even flavour descriptors – and banks of bizarre US snacks and crisps and wondered just who the hell buys that stuff, especially at £7 a go – only to see a group of four or five teenagers rock up and grab armfuls. Basket spend per head? Probably about £25.

That ethos is carried right across the store. Why would you need 70+ flavours of slush? Why would you need 50 digital screens? Why would you need 3,600 different vaping SKUs? Why would you need a Havana cigar humidor, a huge beer cave and an ozone-technology launderette?

And the obvious answer is… you don’t. Unless, of course, you’re trying to do something entirely different. Comparing Racetrack Wishaw to the standard model of what a convenience store is just doesn’t make sense because they’re not trying to achieve the same thing.

Bear in mind, however, that this flight of fancy is the result of a lot of research, a lot of creativity, a lot of experience, a huge focus on detail and a whole lot of work. The Sud family know what exactly what they’re trying to achieve, and they are commendably unfazed by the naysayers and the cynics.

An illustrative example is the official opening of Wishaw. The family signed the lease a full two years before it eventually opened. It was fully fitted out by Christmas 2023 but when they first walked into it after the refit, something wasn’t quite right.

“The minute we walked in, we just agreed that it wasn’t working the way we hoped,” recalls Guna. “We originally had the SpeedQueen launderette at the front door, which would have allowed us to operate it as a 24/7 service that shoppers could access even when the store was closed at night. But when we first walked in, we just realised that it wasn’t setting the right tone to have shoppers walk through a launderette before they got into the store.”

So what did they do? “We ripped it up and started again,” laughs Guna. “It seems nuts now to think about it, but we were so committed to getting it just right that we felt we had no choice.” So the refit was refitted and, 18 months later, the store finally opened on Friday 10 May. “It has been a long journey but we did the right thing,” says Guna.

It’s also interesting to note that, while there is a single-minded commitment to doing it their own way, they are still prepared to be flexible when required. Racetrack Wishaw sits in a retail park slap bang next to Aldi and Home Bargains. That would have been enough to put most people off in the first place. Instead, Racetrack leaned more heavily on the Premier brand and Premier promotions in Wishaw than they usually do, they beefed up the core convenience range in a way they don’t in their other stores, and they went foot-to-the-floor on Home Bargains-style deals. Granted, it’s only a small section of the store that’s given over to frankly ridiculous priced deals, but it’s a big enough space to lure bargain-hunting shoppers in and once they’re through the door, they get exposed to the unique and memorable experience of Racetrack.

The logic is simple and it’s a well-trodden path: lure customers in with cheap, low margin deals, let them experience your world – and they’ll then come back and buy into the rest of your (very high margin) offer. And it’s no coincidence that a huge percentage of what’s available in Racetrack is high margin: slush, vapes, food to go, imported soft drinks and confectionery, the list goes on.

“With the cost of doing business so high these days, we need that margin,” says Guna.  “We achieve 45% blend margin by combining high-margin categories with lower-margin categories like the value range of products we offer to compete with our retail neighbours.

“A lot of the solutions we put in place, particularly the tech solutions, mean that shoppers can self-serve. That helps us push staffing costs down but it also helps enhance the shopper experience, so it’s a win-win.”

Having said that, the store still has 26 staff working across 15 separate shifts, partly because a lot of what the store does is labour intensive. Preparing food and desserts all day every day takes a lot of work and time but, as Guna puts it: “It’s what we do, it’s how we work, so we’re used to it.”

All told, Racetrack Wishaw is the embodiment of a vision, a desire to create a new experience-based form of retail that you might describe as destination retail.

“We try to create destination stores that give shoppers as many unique reasons as possible to visit us,” concludes Guna.

Doing justice to Racetrack Wishaw in the pages of a magazine is simply impossible. You really have to see it for yourself, so if you haven’t already been for a look, it’s one to get in the diary.

Huge congratulations to Shamly, Vikas, Guns and Rits – very worthy winners of the Scottish Local Retailer of the Year Award 2025.