By Patrick Avenell
The new Leading Appliances buying group, formed by the Leading Edge Group to house homeless Retravision members, will soon establish an Advisory Committee of retailers to work with the head office in decision making.
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This Advisory Committee model has previously worked well in the Leading Edge Group’s other industries, such as jewellery, computers and music. The Committee will liaise with head office staff, comprised of experience buying group professionals — business people rather than appliance people — to guide the new Leading Appliance division, as general manager Michael Carr explained.
“We’ve got a mixture of both business people and appliance people running the group,” he said. “We’re going to set up an Advisory Committee made up of the stores and they are going to be involved with our marketing, our core range selection and everything else
“It’s not that they will decide on what everything is, but we’ve got to have their input, and they’re the ones at the coalface selling the goods.
“We run all our groups in a similar fashion — we’re tied in fairly close to our advisory committees — and in conjunction with them and the knowledge we’ve got you can generally get it right, rather than a hit and miss approach.”
The Leading Appliances group is expected to have finalised the transition of around 70 ex-Retravision members by 1 April 2013.