MI Pro

There’s nothing quite like sitting indoors watching people have fun in the sunshine to really ruin a summer. When the sun is out and every passerby has some sort of ice-cream based confectionary, life on the shop floor can get really trying.

But it’s the simple things that keep us going. The timely sale of a top end electric guitar we never thought we’d see the back of and the increasing number of kids turning up for every effects pedal delivery is certainly enough to raise the spirits. A fresh push at getting the shop into the public eye is also being undertaken across the board. Brand new posters and flyers are going out locally, while a bit of advertising in the various regional rags and national mags should help us become a little bit more visible.

As summer is the usual time for a footfall downturn, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to be as pro-active as possible in bringing folks near and far across the threshold of our wonderful little boutique and have been pursuing all manner of unusual activity in order to do so. A newsletter is now going out, while a monthly prize draw is already causing quite a stir among the regulars and there are mutterings about sponsoring a local night going on. We’re keeping our fingers crossed on that one…

We’ve also started dabbling in the dark arts of this inter web-type trickery. That’s right, the internet age has finally arrived in our cautious little world and it’s been quite a shock. Not only do we have a brand new, shiny and sparkling website that punters can buy things from as well as use to check out all our lovely guitars, but there’s Facebook, Myspace, Twitter – it’s never ending, it’s baffling, but it really is quite a lot of fun.

A website and associated blog are, as we all know, an absolute necessity these days, and thanks to a couple of months’ work, a lot of swearing and an awful lot of in-store photography, we can finally feel proud of our online offering.

For some reason, even though our particular store has been around for a number of years and has slowly built a large, loyal customer base of which we are rightly proud, it feels as if only now that we have a tangible online presence, have we finally arrived. All that remains is to see whether we will actually sell anything online or whether this whole endeavour has been a massive waste of everyone’s time.

We’ve emerged blinking from our luddite pen-and-paper based world into the blinding glare of the brave new internet world. As far as information superhighways go, we’re cautiously sticking to the slow lane for now, but hopefully, given a bit of time and effort, we’ll start ramping up the sales soon enough. Here’s hoping,

NEXT MONTH...
Mystery balalaikas, lefty dilemmas and the ongoing struggle for online supremacy are all in the crosshairs of our undercover operative in next month’s issue...