Well what a Christmas we had! We all feel like we’ve shaken the excitement off and we’re raring to go..!
The battery business is heavily linked to the weather (more specifically, temperature), and being in the UK – a country known for such unpredictable weather – this can make our business tricky to forecast. For example, in Winter after a couple of days of hard frost our sales increase by around at least 50% for a good few days.
Conversely, in Spring if we get good weather, millions of folks drag their caravans, motorhomes and motorcycles out from storage, and dust them off to find that their battery has died. (They should of course have been following our battery care guide to prevent this!). However, this could be March, April or even as late as May dependent on mother nature’s whims.
Herein lies the problem – we don’t know when we’ll get these busy periods or even if we’ll get them at all (think Winter 2013/14 when we had no cold weather whatsoever!). Stock levels and staffing are the two main headaches that result from this. We pride ourselves in getting orders out as fast as possible – we aim for 100% delivered next business day – but a cold snap puts this aim in jeopardy. Similarly, we pride ourselves on having the best prices around, and in order to get these great prices form our suppliers we have to order well in advance in bulk… but this can be tricky if we don’t know how cold it will be in Winter and how good the weather will be in Spring! How much stock we will need is almost entirely depended on the weather conditions.
The run up to Christmas wasn’t particularly cold, but for some reason (maybe our trustpilot reviews?) was spectacularly busy for us. We responded instantly by bringing two new staff in to the warehouse, Mike and Dave who’ve settled in extremely well and are outperforming our expectations (High-Five guys!). Now we’re getting our cold weather the sales have turned up another couple of notches and we’re having to introduce efficiencies to enable us to get our orders out at our usual fast pace. Expect another name to join Mike and Dave soon as this rate!
2015 looks to be a very exciting year for us – we’re currently the busiest mail order battery company in the UK, and we have some exciting new developments that will push us even higher. We’ll post exciting information as and when available here, so until then, have a great 2015 from all at Tayna Batteries!
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