Vinyl revival drives expansion at Golden Discs

GOLDEN Discs is opening three new stores across Ireland.

After opening a permanent store on the main street in Wexford on Saturday, the record store chain will open another in the Square shopping centre in Tallaght this Saturday.

It will also open a new store on Dublin’s Henry Street, initially for the Christmas period, with a decision on whether to keep it open fulltime to be made in January.

The three stores will bring the total number of Golden Discs specialist stores to 16 nationwide, and comes on the back of its recently launched online shop.

Golden Discs CEO Stephen Fitzgerald, pictured, said that the website was “growing exponentially, far exceeding the company’s expectations”.

The three stores will create an additional 50 part and full-time jobs, adding to their staff of more than 100.

Along with the 16 stand-alone stores, Golden Discs has concession stores in 80 Tesco stores across the country.

“Demand for music continues to grow and we are really excited to be opening new stores to service that demand,” said Mr Fitzgerald.

“The vinyl renaissance shows no signs of abating and we are refocusing our efforts to grow the category by offering customers a more extensive range of catalogue, re-issues, and new releases both in-store and online,” he said – noting that vinyl sales have doubled in the last 18 months.

As well as specialising in CDs, vinyl, DVDs, and Bluray, Golden Discs, which was established in 1962, also carries a growing range of hardware merchandise including record players and headphones.

In July this year Golden Discs posted a profit of €172,878 for the financial year-end 2016.

Turnover for the period-end December 2016 was €17.9m driven in part by new store openings and a significant growth in sales of vinyl records.