Bestway Wholesale has shared its “winning formula” to support its customers and stay ahead of the competition, alongside its growth plans for the year ahead.
According to the group’s Managing Director, Dawood Pervez, the Bestway promise is all about consistently stocking the right products in the right locations to meet shopper demographics – and at better prices – to ensure retailers can make more margin, whilst investing all profits back into the business to grow and provide long-term stability.
Bestway attributes a large part of its success to being independently owned, giving it the ability to mirror independent retailers’ needs and respond quickly to market conditions.
“Our businesses was created by independent retailers for independent retailers,” said Pervez. “Bestway’s approach to the wholesale market was a massive change to the sector in the 1970s and 1980s and it enabled thousands of convenience stores to thrive. Nothing has changed.”
He added: “We understand wholesaling and retailing. For us it’s all about the customer, hence our investment is deep rooted into improving the customer experience.
“That means lower prices and helping them make better margins, allowing them to pass sharper prices on to the consumer. And add into this, a best-in-class range along with the right offer for every type of retailer, including unaffiliated, symbol and franchise – collect or delivered – epos, web or app ordered. Our depots remain the kings of theatre and activation while managed in a way that retailers would expect – to ensure value is passed on to our customers.
“How do we do it? This last year it has been through delivering leading promotions, keeping supplies consistently available, and helping customers navigate extraordinary economic conditions. And yes, it’s all about price and margins, but there are value-adds which we provide here at Bestway, which have seen massive investment and have set the bar high for any competitor to follow. We run our business as efficiently as we can so that we are better able to invest in price.
“For example, consumer mapping aligned to stores, providing unique forward insight and sharing of market trends, and making new tech available to customers in line with fast-changing use of ‘smart’ tech, and digital enhancement”.
Bestway stated that it is on track for another good year across its 57 depots. Pervez promised that 2023 would see the wholesaler continuing to invest in forward reserves of stock to counter inevitable price increases from suppliers and protect its customers for longer.
He said: “The year ahead will see us maintain the best prices in the business. In fact, our obsession with price has been applied to the KVIs that drive 80% of our business, leading us to benchmark these key SKUs with interrogation – looking at price elasticity and now feeding this into our promotional build.
“Our customers have confidence to shop these key lines from us, the lines are monitored and benchmarked ongoing – we’ve taken the legwork out for them.
“In addition for 2023, we have further homed in on data and insight to shape our strategy and share with retailers’ insights into shopper behaviours, changing missions and how our category performance indexes versus the market. We can now pinpoint changes across categories and move fast to support the changing missions.
“For our stores, this has culminated in the development of the industry’s most respected business growth programme (Shopper First: Drive Five To Thrive), which includes location mapping and store audits for POS development to drive uplift in footfall to stores and pin-pointing individuality of stores and shoppers”.
Bestway’s investment in technology has also included the recent launch of WhatsApp for Business, which ensures retailers receive up-to-the-minute promotion and pricing information. It is claimed to be working well, with Bestway customers making 9% extra spend through this platform.
Pervez concluded: “We believe in listening to our customers and responding. Hence, a big part of what we do across our stores is shaped by our ‘Galactico’ team of well-recognised retailers who meet to discuss business and share ideas that we take on board for future development. The team are advocates for our offer and work closely with our management team.
“So whilst supporting our fundamental position of best prices and great margins for retailers, we really do understand the struggles and opportunities to support where it’s needed and have invested 100% in this space to deliver more to customers than any other wholesale in the sector”.
