Grainger "could open three stores a week"

Grainger Games will open up to five more stores this year after unveiling its 40th outlet three months early.

The retailer has launched 17 stores in the past six months, and the firm’s sales director Phil Moore says Grainger’s operations team has the capability to open three shops a week.

But Moore would not be drawn on the total number of stores Grainger will open, insisting the chain’s days of making bullish and ambitious claims are over.

When you look back at the history of Grainger, we have always been a business that focuses on what we do,” he told MCV.

And I think at certain points other businesses have focused on what we do a little bit more than ourselves. We know what we want to achieve going forward, but let’s talk about it once we deliver. We’ve got a really structured team in the Head Office, we’ve identified exactly where we want to be and we’ve got a fully costed business plan to reach our objectives.

We have a really strong shop-fit team, where we can do two, three stores a week in an organised manner.

And we have a great area manager in James Gee, who works really hard to recruit the team, train them and gets the stores open.

We are ahead of schedule by three months. We’ve got five units that we are looking at currently.

It’s obviously going to go ballistic over Christmas, so it will have to be a balance between opening these stores and focusing on the Christmas sales period.”

Grainger Games also plans to revamp its online and digital offer in 2011.

That is a project for 2011 onwards,” Moore added. It is absolutely a useful part of our business, because like every retailer we know the bricks and mortar and
the online have to go hand-in-hand.”