Join us in a chat with Ravi as he shares us his journey from engineer in India to flourishing retailer in Launceston Tasmania.

Ravi’s newsagency at Prospect Marketplace near Launceston Tasmania looks nothing like a newsagency. This is a wonderful and inspiring business transformation that has locals loving shopping there. It has come so far from when it was run by others as a traditional newsagency.

It is a true treasure hunt retail experience, offering shoppers of all ages fun and inspiring engagement opportunities.

What Ravi has achieved in what was a traditional retail newsagency is an inspiration to other newsagents. he’s done it on a tight budget, using items bought at markets and elsewhere to bring character and warmth to his shop.

We love seeing retail transformations like this and are grateful for the opportunity to share. We are grateful to have helped Ravi on this journey.

This business has been in the family for decades, across two generations. What was once a traditional newsagency is today a vibrant gift shop that has some newsagency lines as a service for customers.

This shop is an excellent example of doing it yourself and creating something genuinely local, warm, comforting and clearly loved.

This shop also shows that you can succeed by trading outside of what people expect for your type of business, that today in retail, your shingle does not have to define your business.

Ulverstone is a wonderful local community, a beautiful part of the world. What Shareen and Wayne have created at newsXpress Leven is a shop people love to visit and spend money in.

Often, local retailers can get caught in their head about what they could do in their business. Seven years ago, Sharene and Wayne set about embracing change, and they haven’t stopped since – creating a business of which they can be proud.

• Location Benefits: Ulverstone’s relaxed lifestyle, with its proximity to beaches and mountains, attracts both locals and tourists.
• Business Evolution: Originally a magazine and souvenir shop owned by Sharen’s parents, Sharen and Wayne have turned it into a gift shop offering a diverse range of products, including homewares, leather bags, and toys.
• Shop Design: The shop boasts unique design elements, such as a black painted wall inspired by New York shops, and custom-made fixtures by Wayne. He even repurposed old boxes into retail shelving.
• Product Range: newsXpress Leven caters to a wide range of customer needs, offering everything from everyday gifts to premium products, with dedicated sections for baby items, games, and even John Deere merchandise.
• Customer Experience: Sharen focuses on creating an appealing and easy-to-navigate shopping environment with distinct zones and storytelling displays.
• Inspiration: A trip to New York inspired Sharen to implement innovative retail concepts.

It was a thrill to see what they have created.

newsXpress Leven brings to Ulverstone in Tasmania a wonderful retail experience, a shop that would be at home on the high street in the UK or in retail streets of Brooklyn. Ulverstone locals love shopping here and visitors are surprised at the elevated shopping experience.

If you recognise the need for a transformation in your newsagency but find your business data isn’t up to scratch, don’t despair. There are immediate actions you can take right there on the shop floor to initiate change.

In our experience, businesses in this situation often have a very traditional shop floor layout. The advice we are about to give is all about deliberately disrupting what you currently have. We have found this can be incredibly helpful for retailers to see their business with fresh eyes and identify new possibilities. It’s a radical and somewhat rough approach, designed to shake things up significantly.

It’s crucial to understand that whatever changes you implement aren’t set in stone. Make these moves, observe the results, learn from them, and be prepared to adjust. Your shop needs to be in a constant state of evolution.

First: Confronting the Old Guard – The Newspaper and Magazine Unit

If your shop features a traditional magazine fixture running down the length of the store, with newspapers facing customers as they enter, here’s what you need to do: remove all the stock and rip the entire unit out. Don’t overthink this; just get it done.

That prime central space is valuable retail real estate that should be dedicated to products yielding a gross profit of 50% or more. Allocating this high-visibility area to products with a 25% gross profit or less is simply not a sound business decision.

Tear the whole unit out.

Now, using basic, low-cost shelving – the kind you’d find in any hardware store – relocate your magazines to the back wall of the shop. Whatever was previously in that back wall space will need to be moved elsewhere. Simple strip shelving with adjustable brackets will suffice.

Place your newspapers on a low, flat shelf beneath the magazines.

Furthermore, if you’ve been displaying newspaper or magazine posters, it’s time to stop. They don’t effectively increase sales.

Second: Filling the Newly Liberated Space

Find a couple of old tables or some sturdy wooden boxes. Use these to create display areas on the main shop floor. On each of these makeshift displays, tell a story about a specific product category. Bring products to this central part of the shop that customers might not typically encounter.

If you don’t have spare tables, check out your local op. shop, your garage, or a discount retailer like Amart. Keep your spending to an absolute minimum.

Resist the urge to use spinners in this newly recovered space.

Carefully select products that you are genuinely proud to offer.

Crucially, make sure to include some products that you think won’t work for your customers. This is a vital step in uncovering what you don’t yet know about their preferences and buying habits.

Be prepared to completely change these displays within a week if they aren’t generating the results you’re looking for.

Three: Observe and Learn

The initial changes might not yield immediate success, and that’s perfectly okay. If they don’t, make further adjustments and continue experimenting until you see positive outcomes.

You might also experience some early wins. If that happens, capitalise on it – do more of what’s working.

If your business still has that traditional central magazine and newspaper unit, we suspect you’ll see some encouraging results from this radical shift. That’s been the pattern in every similar business we have seen try it.

Most importantly, have fun with this process.

We know one newsagent who, after making these changes, hosted a Saturday afternoon sausage sizzle specifically so people could watch as they literally used a chainsaw to dismantle and remove the old magazine unit from the shop!

The fundamental aim of this initial move is to disrupt your ingrained view of your business. Yes, the shop floor will be temporarily disrupted, but more importantly, you need to be disrupted in your thinking. That’s why you need to undertake something radical that you’re likely to initially resist. These suggested changes could potentially do more for your personal perspective than for the immediate bottom line of the business itself.

newsXpress helps Aussie newsagents and small business retailers thrive.

The local Aussie newsagency is changing and newsXpress is grateful to serve these businesses and help them navigate change.

This video features photos from some of our newsagency customers. We made it as part of our commitment to help local newsagents reach beyond tradition to attract new shoppers who otherwise might not consider their businesses.

While Aussie newsagencies are rooted in tradition, many of their shops have shrugged off tradition in favour of more modern retail offering unique and wonderful products.

We are thankful to count many newsagents as customers. Many of these are gift shops too, jewellers, clothing shops, coffee shops and more, while still identifying as a newsagency. Such is changing retail today.

This video is branded newsXpress as that is the newsagency marketing group with which these businesses are connected.

Aussie newsagencies have been around since the 1800s. They were created to distribute magazines in the goldfields. The channel has gone from close to 5,000 to 2,800 retailers.

The businesses closing tend to be old, out of date and irrelevant to today.

This brief video explores what newsagents of the future could look like and how newsagents can transform to be relevant.

Helping local small business retailers navigate the opportunities of omnichannel is something for which we are grateful here at newsXpress.

Helping small business retailers serve and sell 24/7 bring us joy as these retailers discover a bigger world than their local businesses traditionally reached.

If you’ve not visited a local newsagency for a while, drop in and, hopefully, find a business that has transformed beyond what you expect.

newsXpress is not a franchise group and as such does not operate under the obligations and requirements of the franchise code of conduct.

newsXpress is a marketing group, a local retail business marketing group. It provides support, advice and nourishment for local retail newsagents around Australia.

It is the how and what of newsXpress that sets it as not being a franchise group.

newsXpress is not intrusive or demanding. It does not make demands in terms of products ranged, prices set or how a business operates. newsXpress does not have demands in terms of business name, layout or uniforms.

All of these things and more demonstrate that newsXpress is not a franchise and that newsXpress local retailers are not franchisees, which is liberating for them.