RETAILER OF THE MONTH

Retailer of the month is back, and we are starting with the amazing Exotic Aquatics in Belfast. 

Owned and run by James Black, Exotic Aquatics is one of the prime aquatic retailers in Northern Ireland. We had a chat with him about everything from how he chooses the brands he stocks, to how he sees big growth in planted aquariums and more!

Hi James, please give us a little background about your store and journey through your career in the aquatics industry.

I have been into aquatics from the age of 5, and I’ve always been passionate about tropical fish. So, when it came time to figure out what to do for a job, running a tropical fish store seemed like a no-brainer. Exotic Aquatics opened its doors on the 24th of July 2006. We were only a small operation, run by me and one other full-time employee. We have since moved into larger premises in 2017, where we are to this day. Our team currently has six full time and five part time members of staff.

How do you go about selecting the brands you want in store?

That happened organically. We started with the key brands, Tetra, Eheim etc. Then we listened to our customers, and they told us what they wanted. It’s about what customer service support you get when it goes wrong, and value for money. Also, we pick brands that are readily available. I don’t want anyone to come in saying “I want this” and we don’t have it. They will just go online and order from Amazon.


As an Eheim Digital dealer, what do you like about the brand?

I’ve been selling Eheim products since 1981 and the brand hasn’t changed its stance on quality in that time, the products are reliable and have high standards of manufacture and presentation. You can comfortably say to customers “This is as good as it gets”. Which is of the utmost importance in helping customers keep their aquarium and fish healthy.


Your store is recognised for its displays, how important are displays and how do you go about creating them?

Displays are critical, they are all about “Creating the magic”. They show how everything works, and how good a setup can look. If we don’t provide inspiration, how can we expect our customers to want to go there? Regarding livestock, “If you went into Selfridges and it had a dirty window you’d be a bit disappointed”. I see the livestock tanks as shop windows, all 300 of them!

When creating displays, we ask oursleves “What is it we want to say?”. It must be a sales tool, and everything must be demonstrable to customers.

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Marine, generally speaking, has seen an industry-wide cooling off, you say you are still successfully growing this category, what are you doing different?

The industry has changed, I think it would be risky to attempt to open a marine only store now, you must cut your cloth according to your means. What we’ve seen is probably the peak of retailers getting into marines, and now it’s going back to where it was before that.

I think the marine retailers that have prospered are the ones that are fully on board, specialising and doing it really well. Having staff that are fully engaged, passionate and championing it are essential and we have also invested in inspiring displays to whet peoples appetite of what good looks like.

Plants and aquascaping seems to be a high growth area now, why do you think that is?

Planted aquariums are the new Marine. There are scores of talented aquascapers on social media creating interest and opening the hobby up to new demographics I think when you have part of the industry supported by that level of amazing and easily accessed imagery, you can’t help but want to have a go. The nice part about this is you can easily do it in a 60-litre tank if you want, you don’t need hugely expensive tank setups, but of course there is always the option to upgrade later.


What does good livestock, and having a good process for sourcing livestock look like to you?

We are all fish keepers at Exotic, and we have implemented a strict process on livestock including a stringent quarantine process which gets them to the best situation they can get to before we put them on sale. When people walk into our store we want them to be wow’d. My brief has always been, “If you wouldn’t buy it don’t sell it”.

Sourcing livestock is an ever-changing landscape, and it’s probably the most difficult part of this business. We aren’t big enough to throw our weight around and make demands on our suppliers, but what we do have is a good consolidator who listens to our feedback and is available to advocate for us. Those key relationships are essential to success. 

We are quite specific about what we want from our suppliers, making it clear that we have a high bar, if we are sent rubbish, I won’t be buying from you anymore.

You mention one of your specialisms as Koi, what kind of Koi do you sell?

We’ve stayed away from the high-end stuff, there are two or three guys here in Northern Ireland who sell Japanese Koi. Like marines, I think you really need to fully commit to sell those. We decided that for a seasonal part of the business, we aren’t really set up for that.

Pond has been in decline for our business in recent years; the wet summers of recent years killed it completely. When ponds were being promoted on tv programmes with the likes of Alan Titchmarsh bringing the vision to the forefront of people’s mind, trade was easier to build. We find water features a much easier sell these days.


What’s the difference between good and great customer service?

My Dad would call it the plus one factor (going the extra mile), he said the standard you expect should be the standard you deliver. Customer service is as much about what you do when things don’t go well, as well as things like customer greetings when they walk in, or answer the phone. I train the team to assume the customer walking in is visiting for the first time. Our team make it their business to know the customer’s name and learn everything as much about them as they can to deliver a truly personal service.

It’s also a 360 thing, people say customer service is about the person, which yes, it is, but it’s also about the product, the product giving you confidence to sell it, and the overall presentation of yourself and the store. It’s about continually reinforcing your standards. We are hot on Google reviews also, if we receive a poor review, we try to connect with them and rectify the situation and learn how we can improve. It has to be said, occasionally you just have call them out as being unreasonable.


You have a fun acronym in the store, saying you are Fantastical, Innovative, Specialist, Hobbyists, FISH. How did that come about?

We came up with that about 6 months ago, we run group training nights, we talk about who are we and who are we about. So, I asked the guys, “What are we truly about” and that’s where FISH came from.

It’s difficult to innovate as a reseller, but when we think about culturing our own corals, that’s a first for Northern Ireland. Even making the decision to partner on the Eheim Digital programme is innovative as our market is generally a little slower to take new technologies but we try and stand out as pioneers and give it a go.

Then of course are all specialists, and we are all hobbyists, you wouldn’t work here if you weren’t.


Where do you see the future of the business?

The pandemic really set us in the direction of ecommerce which we see as our second store. Northern Ireland is a small market, we can’t meaningfully grow in terms of retail space. But we can target the wider UK and Irish market through e-commerce.

We had to create a sub-brand for e-commerce. The whole process of growing a business outside your borders is very involved, you can’t suddenly increase your stockholding by several hundred percent, unless you have some outside investment. So, we had to look at the easiest and best way of doing it via ecom and on bigger, high value lines - drop shipping.

Unlike most other trades, due to the livestock, there will always be a need for bricks and mortar, and I think any ecommerce only business needs to recognise that element for the long term success of the trade.


Any fun stories?

At one stage, we bizarrely got involved with film companies. The most recent one was in 2019, when they took over the shop for a film with Liam Neeson in it, his character had a scene where he came in to buy a new goldfish. It was fun, Liam is from Ballymena, so we got to chat briefly, he was a lovely guy. The filming was like a military operation; lorries arrived with 90 people and just took over the shop. Liam then arrived in an SUV with his security, and we couldn’t even go upstairs in our own shop, because he was up there rehearsing his lines!

That’s the closest you get to fame and fortune in this part of the world.


Any words of advice?

The man who taught me everything I knew, Alfie Robbins, once said “Fishkeeping is a fine line between depression and euphoria”. You are always somewhere on that line, sometimes having a great time when business is going well, or you are having a lot of problems. I think that sums up this business and the industry pretty well.



RETAILER OF THE MONTH

Retailer of the month is back, and we are starting with the amazing Exotic Aquatics in Belfast. 

Owned and run by James Black, Exotic Aquatics is one of the prime aquatic retailers in Northern Ireland. We had a chat with him about everything from how he chooses the brands he stocks, to how he sees big growth in planted aquariums and more!

Hi James, please give us a little background about your store and journey through your career in the aquatics industry.

I have been into aquatics from the age of 5, and I’ve always been passionate about tropical fish. So, when it came time to figure out what to do for a job, running a tropical fish store seemed like a no-brainer. Exotic Aquatics opened its doors on the 24th of July 2006. We were only a small operation, run by me and one other full-time employee. We have since moved into larger premises in 2017, where we are to this day. Our team currently has six full time and five part time members of staff.

How do you go about selecting the brands you want in store?

That happened organically. We started with the key brands, Tetra, Eheim etc. Then we listened to our customers, and they told us what they wanted. It’s about what customer service support you get when it goes wrong, and value for money. Also, we pick brands that are readily available. I don’t want anyone to come in saying “I want this” and we don’t have it. They will just go online and order from Amazon.


As an Eheim Digital dealer, what do you like about the brand?

I’ve been selling Eheim products since 1981 and the brand hasn’t changed its stance on quality in that time, the products are reliable and have high standards of manufacture and presentation. You can comfortably say to customers “This is as good as it gets”. Which is of the utmost importance in helping customers keep their aquarium and fish healthy.


Eheim are known as a premium brand, how do you go about selling it to customers?

Unlike other manufacturers, Eheim don’t have tiered sub brands. All products are branded Eheim and offer the same quality, from the entry level Classic range through to the all-signing all dancing Professional ranges at a more premium price point. We train our sales team to initially pitch at the professional range with a view to making the fish keeping experience as easy as possible, the customers body language tells us if we need to opt for a lower cost item in the range.

For higher priced items, we offer finance through Klarna. We’ve also adopted the Tesco/Sainsburys model of giving extra discount off higher margin products using our loyalty card, helping to grow sales.


Your store is recognised for its displays, how important are displays and how do you go about creating them?

Displays are critical, they are all about “Creating the magic”. They show how everything works, and how good a setup can look. If we don’t provide inspiration, how can we expect our customers to want to go there? Regarding livestock, “If you went into Selfridges and it had a dirty window you’d be a bit disappointed”. I see the livestock tanks as shop windows, all 300 of them!

When creating displays, we ask oursleves “What is it we want to say?”. It must be a sales tool, and everything must be demonstrable to customers.


Marine, generally speaking, has seen an industry-wide cooling off, you say you are still successfully growing this category, what are you doing different?

The industry has changed, I think it would be risky to attempt to open a marine only store now, you must cut your cloth according to your means. What we’ve seen is probably the peak of retailers getting into marines, and now it’s going back to where it was before that.

I think the marine retailers that have prospered are the ones that are fully on board, specialising and doing it really well. Having staff that are fully engaged, passionate and championing it are essential and we have also invested in inspiring displays to whet peoples appetite of what good looks like.



Plants and aquascaping seems to be a high growth area now, why do you think that is?

Planted aquariums are the new Marine. There are scores of talented aquascapers on social media creating interest and opening the hobby up to new demographics I think when you have part of the industry supported by that level of amazing and easily accessed imagery, you can’t help but want to have a go. The nice part about this is you can easily do it in a 60-litre tank if you want, you don’t need hugely expensive tank setups, but of course there is always the option to upgrade later.


What does good livestock, and having a good process for sourcing livestock look like to you?

We are all fish keepers at Exotic, and we have implemented a strict process on livestock including a stringent quarantine process which gets them to the best situation they can get to before we put them on sale. When people walk into our store we want them to be wow’d. My brief has always been, “If you wouldn’t buy it don’t sell it”.

Sourcing livestock is an ever-changing landscape, and it’s probably the most difficult part of this business. We aren’t big enough to throw our weight around and make demands on our suppliers, but what we do have is a good consolidator who listens to our feedback and is available to advocate for us. Those key relationships are essential to success. 

We are quite specific about what we want from our suppliers, making it clear that we have a high bar, if we are sent rubbish, I won’t be buying from you anymore.



You mention one of your specialisms as Koi, what kind of Koi do you sell?

We’ve stayed away from the high-end stuff, there are two or three guys here in Northern Ireland who sell Japanese Koi. Like marines, I think you really need to fully commit to sell those. We decided that for a seasonal part of the business, we aren’t really set up for that.

Pond has been in decline for our business in recent years; the wet summers of recent years killed it completely. When ponds were being promoted on tv programmes with the likes of Alan Titchmarsh bringing the vision to the forefront of people’s mind, trade was easier to build. We find water features a much easier sell these days.


What’s the difference between good and great customer service?

My Dad would call it the plus one factor (going the extra mile), he said the standard you expect should be the standard you deliver. Customer service is as much about what you do when things don’t go well, as well as things like customer greetings when they walk in, or answer the phone. I train the team to assume the customer walking in is visiting for the first time. Our team make it their business to know the customer’s name and learn everything as much about them as they can to deliver a truly personal service.

It’s also a 360 thing, people say customer service is about the person, which yes, it is, but it’s also about the product, the product giving you confidence to sell it, and the overall presentation of yourself and the store. It’s about continually reinforcing your standards. We are hot on Google reviews also, if we receive a poor review, we try to connect with them and rectify the situation and learn how we can improve. It has to be said, occasionally you just have call them out as being unreasonable.

You have a fun acronym in the store, saying you are Fantastical, Innovative, Specialist, Hobbyists, FISH. How did that come about?

We came up with that about 6 months ago, we run group training nights, we talk about who are we and who are we about. So, I asked the guys, “What are we truly about” and that’s where FISH came from.

It’s difficult to innovate as a reseller, but when we think about culturing our own corals, that’s a first for Northern Ireland. Even making the decision to partner on the Eheim Digital programme is innovative as our market is generally a little slower to take new technologies but we try and stand out as pioneers and give it a go.

Then of course are all specialists, and we are all hobbyists, you wouldn’t work here if you weren’t.


Where do you see the future of the business?

The pandemic really set us in the direction of ecommerce which we see as our second store. Northern Ireland is a small market, we can’t meaningfully grow in terms of retail space. But we can target the wider UK and Irish market through e-commerce.

We had to create a sub-brand for e-commerce. The whole process of growing a business outside your borders is very involved, you can’t suddenly increase your stockholding by several hundred percent, unless you have some outside investment. So, we had to look at the easiest and best way of doing it via ecom and on bigger, high value lines - drop shipping.

Unlike most other trades, due to the livestock, there will always be a need for bricks and mortar, and I think any ecommerce only business needs to recognise that element for the long term success of the trade.

Any fun stories?

At one stage, we bizarrely got involved with film companies. The most recent one was in 2019, when they took over the shop for a film with Liam Neeson in it, his character had a scene where he came in to buy a new goldfish. It was fun, Liam is from Ballymena, so we got to chat briefly, he was a lovely guy. The filming was like a military operation; lorries arrived with 90 people and just took over the shop. Liam then arrived in an SUV with his security, and we couldn’t even go upstairs in our own shop, because he was up there rehearsing his lines!

That’s the closest you get to fame and fortune in this part of the world.


Any words of advice?

The man who taught me everything I knew, Alfie Robbins, once said “Fishkeeping is a fine line between depression and euphoria”. You are always somewhere on that line, sometimes having a great time when business is going well, or you are having a lot of problems. I think that sums up this business and the industry pretty well.