Wannabe PhD uses research skills to give new lease of life to family’s village store

Amit Puntambekar spent two years in research, advice-seeking and store visiting before launching the new avatar of the village store owned by his family.

The second generation Nisa retailer had plans to do a PhD at Cambridge, but his career took a step in a different direction once he started helping in the shop.

“I’d head down in the mornings and slowly I fell in love with the business,” Amit said.

And so began the lengthy planning process to take the village store to the next level with Amit going into great detail to determine how best to develop the business.

In fact, he took over the running of the 1,400 sq. ft store in Fenstanton, near Cambridge, at the end of 2017 after persuading his father to give him a go rather than sell up.

The results of the research are impressive with the entire store undergoing a modernisation programme.

Amit explained: “We focused on the fresh offering, so we now have about 18 metres of chilled food. For a store of our size that’s a lot. When the Co-op range came in, we found we ran out of space. I knew we weren’t unleashing the potential of what was available to us, so we needed more space, better presentation – these products are fantastic. That own brand range gave us a huge amount of confidence to go ahead with the refit.”

As well as a new bakery and coffee machine to develop food to go sales, Amit said the wow factor of the refitted store is what impressed customers first.

“We’re not a corner shop anymore. We know a lot of people in the village rely on us for their everyday needs, so we didn’t just go ahead, shut and do a refit. We spoke to the regulars for three months leading up to it. Many said they didn’t think we needed a refit, because we’ve always maintained the store and taken pride in what we do. They couldn’t understand why we were doing it. But as soon as we did it, everyone was amazed.”

And the refit has led to a boost in sales for the store with further improvements expected.

“We saw in January that weekly, like-for-like sales were up by quite a few thousand pounds. I’m very excited for the summer to see what happens,” he said.