Maplins is in trouble. The company, which is a year older than me, employs over 2000 people across 200 stores and is in administration. I am angry about this: not because I’ll particularly miss it, but because the company was uniquely positioned to capitalise on the rise of the Maker Culture and failed this new community completely.
It used to be the place to get electronic components and tools from: I daresay everyone who was remotely interested in electronics in the 80s and 90s will have had experience of using their one-time-extensive catalogue to learn, and pick stuff to buy. They used to employ people who knew the anode end of a diode from the cathode, and why that matters. When I needed advice on which transistor to use for a project, for example, someone in store would be able to advise me correctly. The transistors were pennies, but I’d buy other stuff from there because the experience was great, unique and not something I could get elsewhere.
I reckon it was around 3 years ago that my local store lost the last of their staff with electronics knowledge. Since then, trying to buy components felt like you were inconveniencing them, and recently they’ve moved to having self serve drawers badly stocked and jumbled up.
The staff are typically enthusiastic, and would undoubtedly say they’re “into tech in a big way”, but asking a technical question will be met with “you need to ask X, he’s our tech guy, he’s even built his own computer” or alternatively, the answer “have you Google’d it?”
Maplins in 2014 started advertising their experts as their unique selling point: in 2014 they started a campaign suggesting maplins was the answer “when your tech know-how runs dry”
There is literally no reason to visit the place. It’s not the experience, it’s not the convenience, it’s not the stock and it’s certainly not the prices.
The UK has a maker industry to be proud of. The Raspberry Pi is utterly fantastic, British designed and British assembled. I often want another for a project despite already having a brace of them. My choice is to either drive to Maplins to find that they’ve got a battered boxed one in stock for £46.99 including a 16GB Micro SD, or order the same on Amazon Prime same day for £31.96 + £8.28 for the card. I don’t really need the card, but Maplins never carry stock of their advertised £36.99 Pi 3. The nearest store with stock is a mere 170 miles away, and you can’t order for delivery.
They’ve tried to appeal to the mass market and compete with random electronic tat you’d find in gadget stores, Menkind, Red 5 – or for a lot less on Amazon or ebay. That doesn’t appeal to their core, and store locations are typically out of town centres so won’t be impulse purchases.
They used to be the go-to place for cables and connectors, but prices are so incredulous that it is cheaper to go to PC world, which is saying something.
They’ve dabbled with smart home, but staff appear to not have been trained beyond a demo script, so the value add of being able to speak to an expert and leave knowing how you’ll set something up is
Their market position was to be the experts who could advise you on consumer technology. They based their USP and advertising on their expertise: https://www.marketingweek.com/2014/05/02/maplin-launches-first-tv-campaign-to-promote-its-tech-expertise/ , but then failed to retain the people who could deliver this promise. This could have worked, and would have differentiated from PC World, Amazon, ebay, and the online experience. They were going after the mass market of consumers who didn’t know technology.
Whilst all this was going on, the Pi was going from strength to strength and a slow evolution was happening empowering people to build fantastic things. Maplins were relegating the hobbyist geek to an unwanted draw on their time, reducing stock of components, and not valuing expertise. The equivocated with geeks: they stocked 3D printers, but once again didn’t have the expertise to translate stock into sales. Staff could print a demo, but when asked about designing your own models and what software is needed, simply no-one knew.
Some of their stores are unfit for purpose: the Leeds regent street store is a huge warehouse of a place, always cold, always empty, and always with a lot of wasted space. As mentioned, location is an issue too for mass market footfall.
Interestingly, PC World have started advertising that their staff take technology home to understand and use it… Maplins have lost that “expert” war, and if they are to continue, they will need to work out what their target audience and USP is.
What would I do? Focus on makers, focus on experience, and focus on enabling and supporting a maker community. They have the locations to be community maker hubs. They don’t have the expertise, but they have enthusiastic staff some of whom would be willing to learn. Their competition is specialist retailers, Pimoroni, The Pi Hut, and the online bazaars, but Maplin can fill a gap here, and use that community to move more technology into the mainstream… They could have stock, run events, be the place to go to learn and practice things.
I am thinking of the Games Workshop model, but for Makers rather than Battlers.