Matthew Hunt joined Royal Ballet and Opera as Head of Retail in February 2025. Here he tells us about his first six months in the role – the challenges and opportunities, and the six big things that he tackled head on to achieve positive and tangible results.
When I joined Royal Ballet and Opera (RBO) I was overwhelmed with opportunity, kindness and eagerness. On my first day I was given a full tour of the building and was shocked at the mammoth scale of the organisation. I got in the lift and was soon joined by a block head and wig, some ballet dancers, and a huge clothes rail of costumes for that night’s production – a true reflection of the cogs that make the building and the organisation run!
Our financial year runs alongside our season schedule, September to August, so I had joined at the exact halfway point with six months to implement enough change to help us achieve our forecasts. A huge task ahead, but an exciting one.
1. Getting to know my new team
My immediate focus on joining as Head of Retail was to get to know the team and ways of working to understand how things flowed in the world of Royal Ballet and Opera retail, including spending time working on the shop floor to experience what a typical day in our shop felt like.
Armed with all this information I was able to create my own diagnostic of where we were and where we needed to be, identifying the quick wins to unlock more revenue, more capacity and greater enjoyment for our individual roles. I made sure to listen to each person and encouraged them to tell me their frustrations and ideas so that when things did change, they could see that they’d influence and contributed to the positive change.
2. Identifying Areas for Growth
I work at pace, and with the end of the financial year looming, we needed to get to work quickly to execute those quick wins. Within the first four weeks we had identified that custom print on demand could be a great income driver as we have access to beautiful archive production posters which have been scanned and restored to a high level. This also provided the opportunity to transform a shop wall that had been the same since 2018, hosting a range of limited edition prints which were relatively slow sellers.
We worked with our in-house design team to create a full feature wall celebrating our new branding, and King & McGaw provided us with five prints of varying sizes in different frame finishes. Since implementing this wall, we have increased our sales volume by +51% and net income has risen by +18% versus the same period in 2024.
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Other areas for quick wins included the look and feel of the shop. Working with VM and creative specialist, Jane LeBon, we ordered new props to enhance the product offer, as well as reorganising the table layout to highlight our storytelling.
It was important to ensure the shopfloor team didn’t feel put out by a new visual merchandiser coming into support us, particularly as they’d looked after all the shop visuals in the past. This exercise was more about giving them the skills they needed to confidently carry out updates in-house. To do this we organised a visual merchandising workshop with Jane in which we talked through the fundamentals of VM, why we do certain things and the impact it can have on the customer experience as well as sales. Since then the team have gained immense confidence fixing tables and displays, taking what they’ve learnt and applying it to everyday operations.
3. Crafting a Retail Strategy
After a few weeks of getting to know the team, building and organisation, it was time to start crafting the new retail strategy for the 2025/26 season. I began with a current diagnostic of the retail department from my talks with the team, and looked at it from various angles.
- Internal advocacy – ensuring RBO Retail was always a part of every conversation across the organisation
- No distinct buying strategy and no clear profile of our key audiences who shop with us, particularly instore
- More to unlock with our online shop – updating it to fit our new brand and to support the buying strategy
- The physical shop is end of life and needs a full re-fit to drive growth
- Further professional development for the RBO Retail team to support them with the tools to succeed.
We also wanted to focus on driving margin, boosting exclusivity of products, driving online sales and controlling our overheads as much as possible.
From this I created a new purpose for RBO Retail:
Deepen our engagement with our audiences through creative and inspiring merchandise which contributes a positive financial return to support the Royal Ballet and Opera.
4. A New Direction for Buying and Merchandising
Without a solid buying and merchandising strategy, it’s incredibly hard to find the focus to plan for success. I sat down with our fantastic buying and merchandising team – Maud Stiegler, Buying and Merchandising Manager, and Bess Shooter, Buying and Merchandising Assistant – and we did a full audit of the entire product offer. It took a total of 12 meetings across a few weeks where we covered 2023 vs 2024 sales for each product category and then did a deep dive into line detail of each product. We analysed the physical product, cost price and retail price to see where our average profit margin was and where we could improve it.
The average profit margin at the time was sitting around 52%. Now, after a lot of re-negotiation with our suppliers to achieve better cost prices, exploring stretch with our retail prices and being more confident with purchasing at volume to drive down costs, we have grown that average margin to just over 60% for all new products for the 2025/26 season – with a lot more work to go!
We know that our audiences respond well to ‘new in’ emails, so our buying strategy has shifted to create more bespoke and exclusive products. We wanted to create our own iconic tote bag, and we worked closely with our in-house creative studio to conduct market research. We landed on a ‘step and repeat’ design of our new logo in varying colourways and across several product types and have named it the ’Signature Collection’.
We worked with several suppliers such as Paul Bristow, Crawford & Henderson, Judges, Cornflower and Customworks to create a full range of tote bags, notebooks, pens, keyrings and mugs. The four colourways have huge impact both instore and online, where each product is brought to life using a dynamic GIF image.
Christmas is also huge for us, our ‘Golden Quarter’ during which we take around 60% of our annual revenue, so it’s imperative that we get the product selection right. This year we have expanded into more bespoke decorations, working with St Nicholas to develop a gorgeous new snow globe decoration featuring the façade of the building. We’ve also developed our first totally bespoke and exclusive limited edition Christmas jumper, a nod to our iconic production of ‘The Nutcracker’, selling over 200 units in the first six weeks.
We’ve also taken inspiration from our surroundings, particularly our pit lobby décor, where the carpets feature a pattern which includes harps and sheet music, and the walls are adorned in a contemporary stripe. We thought these two styles clashed and complimented each other in the best way possible and so we developed a small homewares and food range called ‘The Heritage Collection’. Again, we worked with our incredible database of suppliers and developed a variety of products including tea towels, biscuit drums, chocolate bars and totes to bring the range to life.
5. Enhancing Our Digital Presence
The online shop urgently needed an update to bring it into line with the new branding and ensure a consistent first impression for online customers. Working with our wonderful eCommerce Manager, Helen Clements, as well as our incredibly talented Digital Product and Analytics team, we carried out user testing research to discover how visitors interacted with our existing shop and help us identify what updates were needed.
The new Shopify site was launched in August and feels like a brand new shop! There’s still more to add, including an upsell feature at checkout to encourage customers to add more to their basket to reach free UK standard shipping, as well as Membership upsells to support our philanthropic goals. However, we are already up +48% for September and October versus 2024.
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6. Focus on the Operations
A cultural gift shop is nothing without the operational team who run it day in, day out. They are on the frontline and are the ones who are brilliantly representing our organisation. The RBO retail team do everything with such passion and energy, and I wanted to give equal focus to each department, particularly after launching a new website and creating so many new products – this was a lot of change for them.
Daily operations were already working well, expertly run by our Retail Manager, Gina Randall, and supported by two wonderful supervisors, Lily and Nahema. The team deal with a whole range of visitors, some just visiting the shop, patrons attending a show, excited tourists who have just been on a backstage tour or diners enjoying our new restaurant Cicoria.
We’ve incentivised the shop team with monthly goals to keep them engaged in a positively competitive way. Each month the team are tasked with a challenge such as ‘Sell 800 tote bags’ or ‘Increase the 3 for 2 Pin Badge offer vs last month!’. They take on every challenge with vigour and always achieve and exceed their goals.
We also hold a monthly retail team meeting where I take the team through our financials for the previous month, what products will be landing in store and what we are developing for future ranges. It’s a time for the team to come together, give feedback and ask questions. We round it up by doing ‘Retail Star of the Month’ where we all vote in advance for a colleague who we feel has contributed to the department and who is a real team player.
Conclusion
My first six months at Royal Ballet and Opera has been a whirlwind, marked by a blend of excitement, creativity, exhaustion, and tangible results. This period has been a testament to the dedication and hard work of everyone involved, especially the RBO Retail team, whose commitment and resilience have been instrumental in achieving our goals. Their dedication and effort along with their willingness to embrace change has played a crucial role in our success, demonstrating the importance of teamwork and perseverance, and I’m excited to see where the department will be in a year’s time.
If you want to see for yourself, please do come and visit us at our Covent Garden home at the Royal Opera House, or visit our online shop. Any questions please do not hesitate to reach out to me via LinkedIn.
