Silliest thing to spend money on - customised number plates

I have been driving a lot lately - using Streetcar rather than my own car as car ownership is something I long ago gave up, like smoking and vodka. For some reason I have become aware of the prevalence of customised number plates on the roads of Britain. Once upon a time you would see the odd wideboy in a expensive model car and go , 'Ah, a banker / rock star / gangster' and just raise your eyebrows and move on. Now they are everywhere. Perhaps it's just a hangover from the boom times but every time I see one it gets me - what happened to the recession? Do people in this country really just have much more money than sense?  Why would you spend your money on that? Does it make you feel good, or clever, or is it, as I suspect, just a way of showing 'normal' people that you can afford to waste your money? 

I did a quick search online for a suitable number plate for someone who would like this kind of thing. I found the closest thing I could get for 'wan**r' was W777 KER, for a mere £1194. What is brilliant is that the website did not reject my desired plate name. However on regtransfer.com a search for 'Road Nazi' came up with nothing useful - ORG 45M for £150,000 or 'MO57 WTD' came in at a bargain £125,000.

I see James Caan, who was ever so nice to us on Dragon's Den, is on the front of Regtransfers.co.uk's free magazine with a Rolls plate '28 JC' - that must have set him back. Of course, he is none of the things I searched for above.

Perhaps when I am rich it will all make sense and I will eat these words. I admit to having dabbled in customising my ringtone, by recording stuff I liked and using it, but that was free.

So I suppose the lesson is you can sell anything really, if it reflects the vanity of the buyer. Now I didn't say that of course, because we all know that the buyer is always right.

Retailers play it close to their chest, let's just ignore the forecasts!

It's the time of year we go and talk to our retailers about how we are going to work together for the rest of the year. And this being 2009 the conversations are bound to be interesting. If we are talking it is better than if we are not. The worst thing for a small supplier is when that buyer you were counting on just stops replying to your emails and is never in the office when you call.

We have retailer relationships that range from major high street down and online resellers to the single shop owner in Chipping Norton. Obviously the big accounts matter and we learnt last year that whatever a buyer says in May or June may change in October or November when a global recession takes a huge chunk out of their sales forecast. On top of the general downturn we have to deal with the fact that board games are now dwarfed by computer games. Ho hum, we like a challenge...

One retailer we spoke to said that they'd had some market research indicating that the board game market would shrink 27% this year as a result of Nintendo Wii and DS.  As a consequence they were looking to shrink the range of board games available to ones they were sure would sell.  Fortunately for us, this included About Time!

Another 'top drawer' retailer, whose gilt edged clients consider themselves above the economic fray, had no similar concerns and bought every new game we offered them, whilst another said that they couldn't understand the downturn of 27% figure, as they couldn't get board games onto the shop floor fast enough.

So the story is mixed. And we have some very major developments going on outside the UK, which we are not currently at liberty to discuss.

2009 will without doubt be difficult. I had a call from a game inventor who has 2 or 3 years on us, and was doing well up until last year. Now her buyers do not take her calls. We agreed to chat again in a couple of months.

The quest for celebrity endorsement

Of course About Time would love to be endorsed by the right kind of celebrity. We have made a few tentative approaches but as yet our young brand does not have a 'personality' associated with it. We appeared on Dragon's Den, which aside from getting your product in front of a few million eyes, is a bit like celebrity endorsement by association. I have recounted the story of our DD appearance countless times both to friends and to members of the public during demo days. Yet this is more like brand association. Once when I was doing demos in Hamleys none other than Gwnyth Paltrow wandered behind me doing her Christmas shopping. I was too busy in the demo to stop and haul her in in some desparate bid to shove a copy of our amazing game into her hands.

I am not a bad celebrity spotter myself, but neither am I forthright or shameless enough just to go bounding up to them with commercial association in mind. We would love a TV historian or high brow game show host to get on board the About Time bandwagon, perhaps a newscaster would do it - I saw Jon Snow at the theatre the other day, as well as former Hong Kong Governor Chris Patton, but I was at the National and not going to make a scene.

So the quest continues. We have been fortunate that at least one major retailer chief executive actually played our game at Christmas and then got in touch with his buyer to get About Time into his stores because he liked the game that much. Not quite celebrity endorsement, and perhaps more valuable in the long run.

People who know celebrities are of course a bit careful about exploiting their friendship for some kind of marketing ruse by other people they know. And of course they should be. You can put something in front of someone and they may even like it, but if every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to be endorsed by them, it might be wiser just to say no. Then of course we could just offer them a big pile of cash, but they are already rich, and we aren't. Look at poor old Iggy Pop flogging car insurance presumably to fund his retirement. It's unseemly and feels all wrong. The celebrity should fit the product - and that one is about as wrong as you can get.