Being my first post, I feel the nagging need to justify blogging  in the first place. However, common sense prevails, as the readership, in the beginning,is likely to be pretty low, should it increase at any one time, I would have to keep repeating the justification. The effect of this would be two-fold :

a) put off early readers from reading subsequent blogs

b) put off new readers, thinking why is the blogger constantly repeating stuff….

Having got that out of the way, there is a need to give an outline of what the reader, hopefully, can expect.

I have spent 90% of my working life within the Party industry (91.5% to be precise!), so for good or bad it is pretty ingrained in my working psyche . I shan’t put that percentage into years as it may scare some potential followers away, simply because they might think it is too long and I should go away and get a proper life.

I shall not bang on about ‘experience ‘ as my belief is there are too many people out there who go on about how many years experience they have within a certain field, but don’t tell you that they failed to learn anything with that experience. It is a little like the misunderstood phrase ‘practice makes perfect’. It doesn’t ! It is only ‘proper’ practice that makes perfect. In the same manner, misuse or misunderstanding of your experiences will make the ‘experienced’ no better than the novice , or maybe worse as they have ill informed  preconceptions .

Back to the Party Market. The UK Party Market, is supposed to be one of the largest in the world per head of population . Yet it provides many anomalies. For example, despite market size it is one of the few Party markets (certainly in Western Europe) where there are no retail chains of any size. At retail, balloons account for the lion’s share the shop take, whereas this is not the case in mainland Europe.The retail Party market is still small against the majority of other retail fields. It is not food and clothing. It is not like cars and holidays , or TV and technology. Yet if it didn’t exist, would it be missed. I think so.

So there is a lot to talk about and on occasion, I shall stray into other retail areas , which may take my interest , but always (or nearly) there will be a reference or relationship to the party market.

I have to declare my hand , in so far as I have a vested interest. I am part of the supply chain, but I shall do my best to be as impartial as possible, naturally there will be times that I may stray. I do not intend to offend, any criticism I make is intended to be well founded and hopefully to be taken in good faith to engender the debate that should be undertaken within this market place.

The one fact that is very evident within this industry, is that are many people working in isolation and have little meaningful contact with other retailers whether they are online or on street. Yet there are many issues that could be relieved or even understood if there was an open discourse. Hopefully, this blog may in a small way help to start that discourse.