[1]We loved the spit n’ polish shoeshine concession on Wednesday evening’s BBC Dragons Den [2] TV programme.
The shoeshine booth (shown to the right here) has a place for newspapers (in a neat rack to the left of the person having their shoes shined, a mobile phone charger and a neat LCD screen!!!
Ronan McCarthy pitched to the dragons; 7 customers an hour, 5 minutes for each customer which we thought doesn’t give customers much time to (a) charge their mobile phone or (b) read a newspaper but it’s not a bad amount of time to be a ‘captive audience’ to the screen.
Cool concept (and the booth design we liked a lot) but the revenue figures Ronan was talking about didn’t make much sense to the panel.
1 Comment To "Spit n’ Polish Shoeshine Concession"
#1 Comment By David Street On 20 August 2009 @ 10:02 @460
I met with Ronan and had a look at the booth when he was looking at screens and how to control them. In fairness to him the booth looked great and was very well made but I didn’t get the business model at all. He was talking about the booths being a stealth way of selling the ad space but had no concept that high footfall areas already had the ad sales contracts sewn up.
I personally cant see the rent for a space that big being all that cheap and lets face it a bloke with a box to sit on is all you need for a quick shoeshine.
So I am out