There was a time when I went to Top Drawer armed with a buying list, a notebook and the very real possibility that I’d spend several thousand pounds on stock before I went home. I’d walk the aisles looking for new products, catching up with suppliers, spotting emerging trends and mentally rearranging displays back at the shop to accommodate things I hadn’t intended to buy.
This time, I went with a speaker badge.
I’d been invited to speak at Top Drawer on a subject that sits right at the heart of the work I do with independent retailers today: Get Noticed. Get Chosen. Get Growing. It was a practical session about standing out in an increasingly crowded retail market, giving customers a compelling reason to choose you and turning more of those customers into repeat business.
It also felt like a rather lovely full-circle moment.
Going back to Top Drawer, but from the other side
I attended Top Drawer several times during the nine years I ran my own retail and eCommerce business. Back then, I was there as a buyer, so the experience revolved around finding products, meeting suppliers and making decisions about what my customers might want to see in the shop over the coming months.
Trade shows are exciting places when you’re a retailer. There’s something about seeing everything together, discovering brands you haven’t encountered before and talking directly to the people behind the products that you simply don’t get from looking through a catalogue or scrolling through a wholesale website. They’re also, as anyone who has ever been responsible for a retail buying budget will know, extremely dangerous places for your bank balance.
So it was slightly strange going back and not spending thousands of pounds.
Instead, I was there to share some of what those years in retail, combined with more than 25 years working across marketing, sales and commercial roles, have taught me about getting customers through the door, converting interest into sales and building a business people want to return to.
Getting my speaker badge was the point at which it became real. I’ve got a photograph of me wearing it and, while a lanyard probably shouldn’t inspire that much emotion in a grown woman, I’m rather fond of that picture.
The nerves were very real
I’d love to say I breezed into the show completely unfazed by the prospect of taking the stage. I didn’t. I was really, really nervous.
That surprised me slightly because talking about retail and marketing isn’t unusual for me. I advise business owners, mentor founders, deliver webinars and workshops, and regularly talk about retail, eCommerce and consumer behaviour. But Top Drawer felt different, perhaps because I knew exactly who would be sitting in front of me.
I know what it feels like to be an independent retailer with a head full of ideas and a to-do list that never gets any shorter. I know the pressure of wondering whether you should be spending more time on social media, improving your website, sending emails, working on SEO, sorting out the window, finding new customers and looking after existing ones, while also dealing with stock, suppliers, staffing, cash flow and the customer standing in front of you who needs serving.
So yes, I was nervous. Then I walked onto the stage, looked out and saw that all the benches were filled. I started talking about something I genuinely care about and, almost immediately, the nerves went.
After that, it was exciting. Slightly surreal, certainly, but mostly it just felt really good.
Retailers don't need another 27 things to do
One of the messages that seemed to resonate most strongly was actually one of the simplest.
Stop trying to do 27 different marketing channels because somebody somewhere has told you that you should.
Independent retailers are constantly being told where they need to show up. Instagram. Facebook. TikTok. Pinterest. LinkedIn. Email. Google. SEO. PR. Events. Paid ads. Blogging. Video. The list goes on, usually accompanied by somebody insisting that their particular channel is the one your business can't afford to ignore.
My view is rather different. Pick three.
Choose three marketing channels that make sense for your customers, suit your business and, importantly, are things you don't absolutely hate doing. Then give yourself permission to do those three really, really well.
For one retailer that might mean email, Instagram and local events. For another, SEO, PR and fantastic in-store marketing might produce far better results. There isn't a magic combination because there isn't a single marketing plan that works for every independent retail business.
What there is, however, is a finite amount of time, money and energy.
If you're doing the marketing yourself alongside buying, merchandising, customer service, fulfilment, staffing, accounts and everything else involved in running a retail business, spreading yourself thinly across every available channel isn't necessarily ambitious. Quite often, it's simply exhausting. Three things done brilliantly can achieve considerably more than 27 things done sporadically because you feel guilty that you haven't posted for six days.
A couple of marketers who were in the audience messaged me on LinkedIn afterwards and specifically mentioned that point. I was pleased it landed, because practical marketing advice has to acknowledge the reality of the person who is expected to implement it.
Getting noticed is only the first job
That idea also leads neatly into the premise behind the whole talk. Retailers absolutely need visibility, particularly when customers have more choice and competition for their attention is everywhere. But being noticed isn't the end goal.
You need to get chosen.
Once somebody discovers your business, what happens next? Can they immediately understand what you sell and who it's for? Can they see why they should buy from you rather than one of the many alternatives available? Do they trust you? Is the buying process straightforward, or are there small points of friction quietly encouraging them to leave?
These are the questions I find fascinating because they're where marketing stops being about visibility metrics and starts becoming commercial.
Sometimes the answer to “How do I grow my retail business?” isn't to generate more traffic. It might be to improve the website you've already got, sharpen your positioning, write better product descriptions, rethink your merchandising or remove a bit of unnecessary friction from the customer journey.
That's one of the reasons my own retail experience influences the way I approach marketing consultancy so heavily. When you've run the business yourself, marketing can't exist in a lovely strategic bubble. It has to connect with stock, margin, customer behaviour, operational reality and, ultimately, money in the till.
More customers isn't the only route to growth
Another idea running through the session was a simple framework I use when thinking about retail growth:
More customers. More spend. More often.
When a retailer tells me they need to grow, the instinct is often to focus almost entirely on the first of those. They need more followers, more website traffic, more footfall or more new customers.
Perhaps they do. But acquisition is only one lever.
There may be an opportunity to increase average order value by helping customers discover complementary products. Better merchandising might make it easier for somebody to choose two things rather than one. A well-timed email might bring an existing customer back for their next purchase. A genuinely good experience might turn somebody who has bought once into a reviewer, recommender and long-term advocate.
None of that means customer acquisition stops mattering. It means we should stop assuming that pouring more people into the top of the funnel is always the smartest place to put the next pound of marketing budget.
Sometimes there is more growth sitting inside the business you already have than you realise.
The conversations afterwards were one of the best bits
Standing on stage was brilliant, but some of my favourite moments happened after the talk had finished.
A few retailers came over to chat about their businesses and the challenges they were facing. We talked about websites, reinvestment and that very familiar problem of knowing there are several things you could improve but not being entirely sure which one deserves your attention and money first.
A couple of those conversations have continued since Top Drawer, including one with a retailer considering a website redesign who may need some consultancy support. I've also had messages from people who were in the audience telling me what they took from the session.
That, for me, is the point.
I don't particularly want somebody to leave one of my talks thinking, “Well, she seemed to know what she was talking about.” I'd much rather they walk away thinking, “Right. I know what I'm going to do next.”
There's an enormous amount of marketing information available to business owners already. Adding another 20 minutes of theory to the pile isn't especially useful. My job as a speaker, consultant and mentor is to help people work out what matters, what doesn't and what they can realistically do about it.
A bit of a full-circle moment
One of my other favourite photographs from the day is of me and my Pink Gorilla Collective Co-Founder, Zoe Pocock, standing beside the enormous pink TD letters.
It feels quite fitting because the different strands of what I do have increasingly started to come together.
Through Pink Gorilla Collective, Zoe and I help small business owners get better at marketing when they're doing much of it themselves. Through Steph Briggs Marketing, I work more closely with retailers, eCommerce businesses and other SMEs that need one-to-one strategic marketing support. My work with The Retail Champion keeps me firmly connected to the challenges facing retailers across the UK, while mentoring gives me another opportunity to help business owners step away from the day-to-day and work out where they're actually trying to go.
Speaking gives me a way to bring all of that experience into one room.
I've written marketing strategies and sat in senior commercial meetings. I've advised founders and business leaders. But I've also stood behind the till, placed the stock orders, worried about quiet weeks, dealt with difficult customers, managed the website and wondered whether something I'd spent money on was ever going to sell.
I think both sides matter.
Standing on the Top Drawer stage, at a trade show I'd previously attended as a buyer, brought those two halves of my career together in a way I hadn't quite expected.
What Top Drawer reminded me about independent retail
Independent retail is an extraordinarily creative industry, but the people running those businesses are stretched in more directions than ever. They don't have unlimited budgets, enormous marketing departments or endless time to create content simply because an algorithm would quite like them to.
What they do have is something many larger retailers spend considerable amounts of money trying to manufacture: personality, expertise, proximity to their customers and the ability to create genuinely memorable experiences.
Good retail marketing should build on those advantages rather than burying them beneath generic tactics.
That's what I wanted people to take from Get Noticed. Get Chosen. Get Growing. You don't need to do everything. You need to understand who you're trying to reach, make it easy for them to understand why they should choose you and then give them enough reasons to come back.
It sounds simple written like that.
Doing it well is where the interesting work starts.
Yes, I'd like to do more of this!
I arrived at Top Drawer feeling incredibly nervous. I left wanting to get back on another stage.
I'll be doing exactly that in January when I'm running a panel at Scotland's Trade Show, and I'm keen to add more retail conferences, trade shows and corporate retail events to the diary.
The subjects I speak about sit where my experience does: independent retail, retail marketing, eCommerce, customer experience, conversion and commercially sensible business growth. I particularly enjoy speaking to audiences who don't need another presentation telling them they should “embrace digital” or “put the customer at the heart of everything”. They need someone to translate the big ideas into useful things they can actually do.
So if you're organising a retail conference, trade show, corporate event, panel or webinar and you're looking for a retail speaker with first-hand experience of both marketing businesses and running one, I'd love to hear from you.
ENQUIRE ABOUT RETAIL SPEAKING →
If you're a retailer reading this because some of the questions about your website, marketing or growth have struck a nerve, that's also the work I do every day through Steph Briggs Marketing.
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Get the checklist from my Top Drawer talk
I've turned Get Noticed. Get Chosen. Get Growing. into a free Retail Growth Checklist, designed to help independent retailers look at where they're being discovered, what makes customers choose them and where their next growth opportunities might be.
You don't need to tackle everything on it. In fact, please don't. Pick the three things that could make the biggest difference and start there.