Shops in crisis

With the closure of a major UK archery retailer, are others about to fall? Bow investigates.

As a major UK archery retailer closes, we look at the situation for shops in the UK

The recent news that Aim Archery, a well-known UK dealer based in Battle, Sussex, rang a few alarm bells. It seems only a tiny handful of customers were left out of pocket, but was the industry as a whole in trouble?

It is thought that Aim Archery went too deep with discounting and volume turnover, coupled with a revamp that meant the local council increased their rates, making their running costs too high.

I spoke to a few UK archery retailers to find out what was going on. Two, Andrew Smith at Perris Archery and Ian Weller at Wales Archery, were happy to go on the record. "The council doesn’t understand about margins and revenue when they are calculating your rates for the next year. And there's still a VAT bill every quarter." said Smith.

It is of course difficult for bricks-and- mortar retail stores, with both specialist knowledge and range space to pay for, to continuously discount and price match to the level of purely online retailers. "People see the prices of bows and they’ve already got 25-30% taken off." said Smith.

One of the most common complaints from regular customers is not having items in stock, especially when they are listed as in stock on the website. Part of the problem is that the big ticket items may be slowmoving. "It is tricky and I do my best, but it's impossible to run a business if you are sitting on hundreds of thousands worth of stock." says Smith. "You do get customers who want to run through the shop and say 'I want to try a Hoyt, a Win & Win, an Uukha - oh, and can you price match and set my equipment up included in that price as well?' and it is difficult to accommodate them."

"We try, but you can never have all the colours on the shelf " says Ian Weller. Ian, boss at Wales Archery, is another longtime veteran dealer. "We're pretty happy here, but generally speaking the industry is going through a challenging time at the minute. There was a peak customer base of around 65,000 shortly after London 2012, but that was the high point. The number of archers in the UK has been declining, so we're all working with a smaller number of customers. 2012 was a one-off, really - we didn't get that much of a bump after Rio. There's less customers, but we still have the wages outlay."

Physical shops in the UK tend to be located in more rural areas, because of land values – a frustration for those more urban archers without car transport. Notably, despite having more than a dozen clubs London has just a single shop (barely) within the M25, one of

the Quicks branches. (For contrast, the Paris area has seven archery dealers). Another complaint is a lack of expertise in compound archery in UK shops, with much of the knowledge concentrated in just a handful of even more specialised retailers.

The biggest market is in beginners equipment, rather than the slower-moving top price 'marquee' equipment, with its smaller margins - somewhat ironically, the churn of archers starting the sport and then abandoning it within a year or two is one of the things that keeps the industry in business.

Keen to find out the wider trends, I spoke to a high street retail specialist who wanted to remain anonymous. "The only USP for specialist retail now is service and product knowledge. Unfortunately for the vast majority of the public, these two come some way behind price and convenience." "As the market declines for specialists, sales and margin decline, leading to them holding less stock, so when someone does come in and is disappointed they’re unlikely to return so market declines further. Ultimately, we'll get the physical shops we deserve, unfortunately." he said.

The UK has around 15 specialist archery dealers, 12 or so with physical shops and a few more online specialists. This compares reasonably well with Germany, which has a similar number, although France, with 77,000 registered archers at last count, has well over 50 dealers, although many of these are geared rather more towards bowhunting. It is thought that the industry employs around 120 people in the UK.

Europe is of course on a lot of business owners' minds at the moment, as the yetunknown implications of Brexit work their way through – with one major consequence already. When the pound collapsed after Brexit was announced in 2016 it increased the price of many goods in archery shops – very few of which, apart from the traditional side, are produced in the UK. Alternative Sporting Services, the well-known online dealer, opened an office in Luxembourg a year ago. "We ship to 150 countries worldwide so [most non-eu goods] ship out of the UK office… for now. If Brexit happens and if the terms are not favourable to our business then we will reduce this further to only handling UK orders. Luxembourg will be scaled up to handle the vast majority of the business." said owner Glyn Goodwin this week.

Another potential impact of Brexit is delays at customs. If you think waiting two to five weeks for a bow is annoying, you may have to add several more weeks on to that, especially as some of the major distributors like JVD are based on the continent.

Many retailers have recently expanded their operations to include wider services including accessible ranges and coaching. But in the end, more traditional business differentiators may be what keeps the industry healthy - and Andrew Smith is bullish about the future. "We specialise in service. I’ve had people drive from Scotland, past five archery shops, to fix arrows. I’ve had a chap come from the Falkland Islands. We can do things that add a lot of value. That's what makes the difference."

"We try, but you can never have all the colours on the shelf."