The Open Sesame Story

The best things in life often start small before blossoming into their full potential. Alistair Forrest interviewed Leroy Smith about his mother’s mission in the West of Ireland.

Ali Baba’s magical words became a reality in Ennis, Co. Clare, back in 1988 when Sally Smith opened her first Open Sesame store.

She had been on a government-funded small business course in Galway to learn the basics, and then managed to turn her passion for growing food and the importance of diet and nutrition into an actual shop.

“She was definitely ahead of her time as back then health food shops were very rare and she was one of the first in the West of Ireland,” says her son, Leroy. “The early days were very basic with cheap wood off-cuts installed for shelving by my father Hugo, and a simple ledger notebook for cash incoming and outgoing, along with a red petty cash box and a couple of pens.

“We still have the records from those early days and they are certainly different to the EPOS systems we have in place today. I was four years old when she started the shop, but it wasn’t long before I was recruited, of course.”

After a couple of years in those small premises, Sally moved a few doors down the street to a bigger shop which remains to this day.

“Fast forward to 2000 and she thought our local town of Gort was ready for an Open Sesame,” adds Leroy, “and thanks to the new development of a shopping mall, we were able to hit the ground running and keep both stores going through two recessions, a couple of floods and a pandemic.”

Deserved recognition
Sally was given the award for Service to Retail at this year’s Health Stores Ireland conference in Shannon. I asked Leroy, who is HSI Chair, what was behind this accolade.

“Well, as Chairperson of HSI, I simply rigged it!” he jokes. The reality is that his mother is “a true original pioneering spirit and unstoppable force helping to transform her local community and independent retail”, in the words of the judges.

Leroy treasures the moment when Cheryl Thallon, co-founder of Viridian Nutrition, presented her with the award with some words that hit the nail on the head regarding Sally’s approach to the industry – that she’s always been the one pushing back against the corporates and multiples.

“She’s been at the forefront of the health food industry in Ireland for decades, and indeed served in the same role as me back in the day,” says Leroy. “Sometimes when I think a new issue or approach has come up at Health Stores Ireland, she will of course have a tale of similar stuff from her time as chair.

“She has a positive reputation for challenging convention while also being willing to sit at a table with a regulator or high-flying CEO, to have an honest and open conversation. She was one of the first health food retailers in Ireland and she’s still shaping the industry.”

Open Sesame, open secret
It may sound a standard response for an independent, but Leroy backs up his statement that “our staff are our strength”.

“They know way more than me about the products we sell, which is at least in part thanks to another strength of ours – constantly training and upskilling staff,” he says. “We are always on the lookout for new products and developments and never want to feel we’ve stagnated.”

Attention to detail and individual customer support is another strength. “We have a system in place for special orders and even when it comes to things like locally sourced sourdough, our staff will individually contact customers every week to take their order and then label the relevant bread with their names.

“We also have a loyalty system to reward repeat customers, with whom we are generally on a first-name basis.”

Over and against the strengths, the challenges are the same as everyone else in the health food industry – they are victims of their own success.

“It’s funny in a way that Sally started the business with a passion for sharing knowledge of how important things like digestion are for people’s overall wellbeing, and how supplements can help our health,” says Leroy. “Now that has sunk in and the products that used to be exclusive to health stores are available all over the place! But there’s no point in simply moaning about that, we have to continue to innovate.

“Sometimes it feels like the pattern for health stores is that we ‘break in’ a product – introduce it to market, tell our lovely customers all about it, get it popular and then boom, it pops up in pharmacies and supermarket chains. That’s when we have to dust ourselves down, roll up our sleeves and move on to the next thing we find a passion for.

“Another pet peeve of mine is the direct-to-consumer approach that a lot of brands are now going for. I get that it reduces costs for them when they can sell online directly to their customers, but it is on the aisles of health stores where their products are recommended, grown and sold.”

How Open Sesame went online
Leroy sees the stores’ online business as a similar story to his mother’s original launch of Open Sesame. He started it on a ‘super cheap’ program with only 100 products available online.

“I wish I could say it has grown in a similar way to the physical stores,” he says, “but it’s always been part of the multipronged bunch of roles that I have – from VAT accounting to supplier payments to EPOS system maintenance – so the website forms part of my wider role.

“Some businesses are able to treat online as a separate shop but that’s not quite possible for us. It’s more a way of offering products we already stock, but online.”

However, the Covid-19 pandemic forced Open Sesame to develop it further and specifically to integrate stock levels and pricing with the EPOS system.

“Before that, I had been manually updating stock levels and prices every night after closing time. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, I suddenly had orders for hundreds of kilos of flour that we simply did not have.

“I soon realised this needed to be integrated and thankfully there was a government grant available for e-commerce, which I managed to qualify for.

This meant that we could integrate our EPOS system into the website, so when a stock level changes in Gort, within five minutes the level has adjusted accordingly on the website.”

A strong association
Leroy is chairperson of Health Stores Ireland which, with more than 200 members, is the envy of other countries.

This means that, collectively, the country’s independents have a seat at the table with pharmacists, hardware stores, vintners and so on to make their voice heard.

“Whether it’s listened to is another story, but when it comes to plans for health store retailing, we need to be on top of possible regulation changes down the road,” says Leroy.

“We’ve seen strong campaigns before my time as chair, challenging the proposed VAT rate on supplements for example, where we won the battle but lost the war, and we will need to keep that fighting spirit into the future.

“Our industry can sometimes be seen as alternative, or not as serious as others, when the opposite is true. Our members are passionate about what they do, passionate about helping people, and we need to continue to represent them as best we can at national and international level.”