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By Nigel Cope
Who is the busiest retailer in Britain?
Marks and Spencer? Sainsbury perhaps, or Tesco? Wrong on all three counts. The answer is Richer Sounds, a little-known, privately-owned, cut-price retailer of hi-fi equipment with 28 shops in the UK.
In the Guinness Book of Records, Richer Sounds warrants an entry for the highest sales per square foot of any retailer in the UK - £17,000 - for its store on London Bridge Walk in the City. Even taking an
average across all 28 stores, Richer Sounds still clocks up £5,780 per square foot, ten times more than Marks and Spencer, six times the sales achieved by Sainsbury.
It is profitable too. Sales are up and its operating margin has soared from 3.4 percent in 1989 to almost thirteen percent today. Last year Richer Sounds made profits of more than £3m on sales of almost £48 m.
The man behind Richer Sounds' success is founder, managing director and 98 percent shareholder Julian Richer, a 39-year-old Londoner who, at the age of 14, used to buy and sell candles during the energy
crisis of 1974. A likeable bloke who wears his blond hair in a pony tail and operates from a small converted Victorian vinegar factory in Bermondsey, south-east London, he raps out his sales pitch*.
Even when l was at school I wanted to go into business," he says, "but my age was against me. Property was out - l wasn't old enough to sign а contract. Cars
were out - I couldn‘t drive. So I turned to hi-fi, which was catching on at school.