Jonathan Sellen describes his return to Sainsbury’s in Brookwood near Woking as “a bit of a homecoming”. He’d previously spent a very happy spell in the 75,000 sq ft superstore a decade earlier and he returned nine weeks ago to help colleague Emily Berry run the store while the general manager was on secondment.
Now a permanent staff member once again – and fresh from taking the crown in this week’s Woking & Guildford shop – deputy manager Sellen told The Grocer how the store wins trade from its more upmarket competition, why innovation is Sainsbury’s hidden weapon and what’s changed most during his 22 years in retail.
Who are your shoppers and when are they coming into store? We’re surrounded by houses but also have good links to the M3 and beyond. Plus, with the train station nearby as well as two colleges, while our customer base is predominantly the big weekly shop, it means we serve all other sorts of missions. Trade is heaviest Friday to Sunday. We share the complex with The Range, which makes us a bit of a destination.
The area is known for being affluent, and you had added Grocer 33 competition in the form of M&S this week. What’s your point of difference? We’re in Knaphill, so we’re on our own a bit, with our competitors more towards Woking. So a point of difference for us is absolutely our colleague base. Over 380 people work here. Most of them are local and lots of them have worked for Sainsbury’s for a number of years.
When I look back over the summer, with the heat we had and the World Cup going on, I’m so proud of the colleagues for the way they showed up during that time and the way we showcased Sainsbury’s in the best possible way.
What are your best sellers? Any surprises? The big pull at the moment is our fresh offer. We’ve just gone through a reorganisation and re-laid all of our fresh department in line with the changing season. We’ve had a some decent new lines come in, particularly through our Taste The Difference discovery range, and we’ve got the right mix of own brand and Aldi price match ready for peak.
I’m a firm believer that peak starts now, so it’s a really good time for us to launch new lines. Innovation, particularly in fresh, is one of the areas Sainsbury’s has really done well over the past couple of years.
What’s the biggest challenge you face as a store team? It’s a really challenging retail environment at the moment, so the biggest challenge for us is making sure we show up every day and be the best we can be. We set our standards against our competitors. We visit them all the time. We want to be the first choice for customers.
What’s changed the most about working in retail since you began your career? I started as a Sainsbury’s colleague 22 years ago, and in that time I’ve done all manner of jobs. Customers’ standards now are a lot higher than they’ve ever been, and rightly so. There’s more choice available than there’s been at any point in my career – the pressure is on us to make sure we’re consistently delivering the standards we know we can deliver.
Sainsbury’s launched its Kickstarter work experience programme last month, is there a chance for Woking to get involved? It’s early days and will depend on whether schools locally decide to apply. But it’s a great thing to do, and our team here are perfectly set up to support in any way they can.
What defines success looking forward to the rest of the year? October is just around the corner, so it’s a great time to build some momentum with this win. We’ll be continually benchmarking ourselves against the rest of the town and making sure we show up best for our customers. The ultimate aim for everyone here is customer satisfaction and sales growth, so that’s how we measure our success.
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