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The wonder of woolies.co.uk
Woolworths' online store, now run by Shop Direct Home Shopping Limited, is everything that its bricks and mortar counterpart strove to be, except that the virtual store has a far better chance of thriving in today's hyper-competitive marketplace.
The collapse of the high street favourite at the beginning of the year sent shockwaves throughout the country and was a stark demonstration of how bad things were going to get in the months of recession that lay ahead.
However, the loss of Woolworths was not entirely a surprise. For years the chain had been slowly losing its way and expanding into more and more diverse areas from childrenswear to DIY until no-one really knew where it sat in the high street line-up. Meanwhile, the supermarkets around it expanded and ate into its market share of pretty much everything and online giants such as Amazon and Play consumed most of the rest. In the end, although many people protested at its closure and professed their affection for the chain, sentiment toward Woolworths for most of them was more about nostalgia than the loss of a regular shopping haunt. It was a great store and a great brand, just past its best before date.
Now owned by the Barclay brothers, the brand was reborn as an etailer (www.woolworths.co.uk) earlier this year, with a swish new website supported by an armoury of social networking conduits including a blog plus Twitter and Facebook presences. The furore over Woolworths' high-profile collapse fuelled huge interest in its new incarnation - according to the new owners, nearly 100,000 shoppers logged on to the re-launched site in its first few hours.
It has to be said that the online format is everything that the high street store aspired to be, although the product diversity which was a weakness in its stores is an asset on the web. The company can still offer thousands of products that fall firmly into the "Woolworths" set, from entertainment and games to electricals to children's clothing and toys. However, the DIY and household departments have wisely been dropped.
And a large product range is not the only benefit that an online platform can offer a family-friendly brand such as Woolies. The web helps the company to connect to its fans in a way that it never could in its high street stores, through www.woolieshq.co.uk. This site features an interactive blog, surveys, competitions, freebies, free Saturday morning movies for families and even its own radio station hosted by Last.fm, (featuring a compilation of songs chosen by customers as the first single they bought at Woolworths).
A big jewel in Woolies' online crown is the "Ideas Generator" a charmingly attractive flash-based filter system that generates ideas for games depending on the weather, the location or the number of players. The suggestions then direct customers back to Woolies' products, but also encourage them to join the Woolworths online network, reinforcing the sense of community inherent throughout the site. For example, one game, "Movie Makers", challenges kids (both old and young) from all over the country to choose their favourite film and then either buy costumes online or make their own. They can then upload their photos to the Woolies Facebook group.
With interactive features that interest the young, nostalgic touches to appeal to the young at heart and a wide product range that will appeal to everyone, Woolworths seems to have returned to its former glory.
The company that was born at the start of the 20th Century succumbed to rising pressure and falling sales in its 99th year. Now it has risen from the ashes with a new incarnation that re-awakens the kid in all of us and should keep affection for the Woolworths name alive as it enters its second century. But I still don't know anyone who has bought anything from there.
