Not the usual fare

FRIDAY INTERVIEW/JOE DOYLE, owner of Donnybrook Fair Group:SO LOW is the number of independent retailers in expansion mode these days that those who are tend to attract a few sideways glances.

“People ask ‘are you crazy’ and I say ‘no’,” says Joe Doyle, owner of the Donnybrook Fair Group, of the new 4,000sq ft food store he will open in Stillorgan, Co Dublin, next month. It will be the fourth outlet in what is rapidly becoming an indigenous chain.

Doyle’s business confidence is probably helped by the fact that he has been through recessions before.

“You have to go where life takes you,” he says. “I left school at 15 and got into a trade. That was just the typical thing to do, to follow in the family tradition, and the meat business was our family business. At that age, you have a very clear mind, a very open mind.”

The “little butchers shop” in Shankill, where he started out in the late 1960s, eventually saw its regular trade undermined by competition. As he recalled to a Retail Excellence Ireland conference last week, “Superquinn came to Bray and took a little bit of business, then a shopping centre opened next to us and took a little bit more.”

There had been a convenience shop at the original Donnybrook Fair site for several decades before Doyle “fell into” an opportunity to buy the business in 1991.

“The two ladies who ran it were quite old and one of them was retired. I got an introduction and started helping them with their meat and deli business,” he says. Opening up on his own was a big eye-opener, he says.

He is not naturally comfortable with blowing the Donnybrook Fair trumpet and cringes at the memory of the speech he gave to the retail conference. He has a good story to tell, though, and was warmly received by an audience that seemed to brim with respect.

“In my experience, the 1980s and 1990s were equally as bad as this for the independent retailer. But once we get through this, we’ll all be the better for it,” he said then.

Now, sitting across the table in the boardroom above the Morehampton Road store, he describes his early philosophy as “keeping going until there’s a recession, then a wall comes up in front of you and you have to make different decisions”.

Two facets of Donnybrook Fair’s operation insulate it from the brunt of the current difficulties enveloping independent retail.

The first is the affluent clientele. When it transpired last October that the anonymous winner of a €16.4 million Lotto jackpot had bought the ticket in Donnybrook Fair, the immediate public reaction was that people who picked up their groceries in such a well-to-do locale had already enjoyed their fair share of the breaks in life.

Even the store’s vox-popped shoppers appeared amused that the lucky winner could hail from one of the country’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. This customer base – the kind where everyone seems to know someone who would be just perfect on the Irish version of MasterChef – is not easily replicated elsewhere.

Indeed, Doyle says it took up to two years to build a business in Greystones. He was in the middle of opening the store in 2008, “when the bang happened”, though “we were lucky enough to have it all financially secured”, he says.

“In Stillorgan, the demographics are similar to Morehampton Road, we feel.”

The second happy feature of Doyle’s business – at least prior to the Stillorgan venture – is the freehold nature of his existing properties, which means he’s not trapped by the notorious upward-only rent reviews that continue to cause receivership-threatening ructions for so many other city retailers who don’t have the luxury of international parent companies to help them negotiate with Nama-bound landlords.

Instead, it’s largely just between him and the bank manager. “We’re paying our bills,” he says. “That’s the most important thing at the moment. We still have our problems and issues like any other business, but our costs are less than they were before.”

In 2009, he took on a financial controller and tightened everything up. In 2010, “it was a lot better, the bottom line”. Overall turnover edged up 2 per cent last year, but some elements of the business such as the meat counter and fruit and vegetable section saw double-digit growth.

“We had to take a decision at the start of the recession: do we offer discount after discount, or should we be looking to improve what we do? And we took the decision that we should try to improve what we do,” says Doyle.

He won’t be drawn on whether it is Ireland’s mushrooming cohort of foodies who have boosted business, but he does believe consumers are increasingly concerned about the provenance of what they buy.

Bad publicity for non-Irish multiples has widened the pool of customers keen to shop locally, with Irish food suppliers proving the winners of even limited trends in this direction. “Between what we make ourselves and what we buy in, around 70 per cent of what we sell in store is Irish-produced,” says Doyle.

In addition to the 40 positions that have been created to cover the shifts at Stillorgan, there will be a further 10 jobs added on the food production side, he says, calling them “real, sustainable jobs”. Some 17 per cent of his turnover goes on staff costs.

He’s keen on the idea of apprenticeships and has worked hard to ensure his employees have the opportunity to move around and pick up skills – “the commercial knowledge of the butcher, the baker, the chef”.

He also advocates even closer links between industry and education, venturing that “there’s no better time than now for more apprenticeship schemes”.

But he prefers to leave lobbying on this front, and others, to “the experts”.

He does agree, however, with the broader retail sector that the Joint Labour Committee system of regulated wage agreements is archaic. Abolishing it, he says, would “open up opportunities” for retail staff, allowing employers like him to implement a promotional pay structure more easily. “The JLCs make it hard to reward people,” he sighs.

The new Stillorgan jobs will bring the total at the group to 240 people. In 1991, it had 20. “It’s happened quietly over a period of time,” says Doyle modestly.

The group runs a restaurant, a catering service and a cookery school out of the Morehampton Road site. “If we keep at it, we can make a nice base out of it,” he says of the restaurant, which trades as a separate company. The same room doubles up for private parties. “We had a hockey club in here on Saturday night.”

Right now, he doesn’t make money out of them, but it is all “an opportunity to use the brand”, he says – indeed, one of Doyle’s recent hires is a full-time marketing executive.

“It’s like everything else – we’re constantly trying to get it right. We’ll never compete with the multiples. It’s just a different business model.”

ON THE RECORD

Name: Joe Doyle

Age: 59

Position: Owner and manager of the Donnybrook Fair Group.

Why he is in the news: He is about to open his fourth store in Stillorgan Shopping Centre, Co Dublin.

Background and family: He grew up in Kilmacanogue, Co Wicklow, and attended the local national school and then St Brendan's CBS in Bray for two years, before leaving to join the family business in Shankill.

In 1991, he bought the Donnybrook Fair store and later upgraded it into a bigger outlet, creating a family business of his own. He has added a store in Greystones, a smaller deli on Baggot Street and a restaurant.

He lives in south Co Dublin. He and his wife, who co-owns the business, have one daughter and three sons.

Something you might expect: He enjoys hillwalking, especially on the Wicklow Way route.

Something that might surprise: He is media-shy.