Over the seasons since 2014, the Costume Company has seen an overall drop of 88% revenue during the week leading up to the Rugby Sevens in Wellington.
While much attention has been paid to the declining numbers of ticket sales at the Wellington Rugby Sevens, few media articles have considered the effect that the decline has had on local businesses who once generated a significant amount of revenue from the event.
In this article we talk to Gemma and Russell, owners of the Costume Company, who over the years have been seriously affected by the Wellington Rugby Sevens’ downwards spiral.
Interview Transcript
BT: In your own words, what does your business do?
G: Hire costumes. And some sales, but predominantly hire.
BT: Generally speaking, how exposed are you to the costume rentals that you receive from the Rugby Sevens in Wellington?
G: It’s a question that you have to ask before you get here because it’s a numbers one (laughing).
R: What I can say is we’ve got numbers that I can show from when we first bought the business in 2011 in April and so that meant that the Sevens were in the previous owner’s year for that year. I can give you some numbers that will show our Sevens turnover and which will help, and we can maybe extrapolate that into annual turnover.
G: Our busiest event is Christmas, but of course Christmas is 6-8 weeks. The Sevens are very busy but it’s a short event.
R: So basically, our business revolves around bread and butter business throughout the year, and certain highlights throughout the year. So of the three, Christmas, Sevens, and Halloween, Sevens was our busiest by far. Sevens was busy because it was short.
BT: So it sounds quite debatable about which one was the more sales heavy event?
R: Well Christmas starts for a lot of people in late November and stretches through to the second week of December. With the Sevens it’s a hyped up thing, Christmas is more steady, good turnover, the Sevens has a different dynamic to it. It has a dynamic of 3-4 days of franticness and then it tapers right off. In the early days before the Sevens fell off, Sevens was the best for turnover.
BT: That was way back in 2013?
R: Does that make sense to you, talking about this?
BT: It doesn’t really because it says this year 2016-2017 that turnover is down 88%?
R: Ok, I can explain that. 2013 was our base level. 2014 our turnover was down 24%. There is a little reason for that in that it was a wet Sevens, and there were a couple of elements to it.
BT: That was before they introduced the liquor restrictions and things like that?
G: (At that point) Sevens was still (producing costume hires), it was just what we did that had little effect (that year). It was also we had limitations around what we hire out.
R: So this year, 2015, we fell 51% over that number (the 2014 year figure)… last year we were down 43% over that number, and this year, starting to level off a bit, we were down 23% over that figure. So from 2014, this year our turnover is down 88% from between there and here.
BT: Wow.
R: Yeah, wow. So over the 4 years, that’s an average of 22% (decline in revenue for the period per year).
BT: How long is that timeframe for the base level? Is it for the whole financial year?
G: We’re just talking about the Sevens, the income that comes through (during that period of one week).
BT: I just wanted to be clear about that.
R: We haven’t noticed anything like this for Christmas. It’s been up. Halloween has been up. But this thing, with bad management and a whole raft of crap, has plummeted. What was a fantastic international event, introducing $15-16m into Wellington, has fallen by that percentage, for our business, and the hospo guys will be affected as well.
G: I was at the Sevens for ten years consecutively. The last two years I haven’t been to the Sevens, for the same reason that no one else has gone to it, because you don’t want to go. Spotlight used to be packed full – there’s no one there. Girls used to be out getting their fake tans done, getting their hair done, getting their nails done. All these things that girls were doing for the week before the Sevens – they were out buying things, and all of that industry has just disappeared. And people don’t think that the Sevens (is connected to) the beauty industry but it is! Farmers selling pink nail polish because everyone had to be wearing pink nail polish on the team. The Shoe Warehouse – I bet that they’re down. No one thinks about that kind of stuff but it is huge.
2014 was down 24% but probably mostly because of the rain. 88% down from good years (of 2013 and before) – I can only estimate that 40% of the hires were from people not even attending the Sevens. They just wanted to go out on town and have a good time. It was a Wellington event, not just the stadium. If you were at the stadium you had a better time, but people were dressed up just to go to the party because they wanted to be a part of that fun.
Three years before, Wellington City Council was huge at promoting the event. They called it a four day event that started on Thursday with the parade and they had people out on the grass watching it. They really pushed that event as a four day event with people arriving beforehand. Thursday night was still a massive night for people in town because you had people travelling in from out of town. They had to eat dinner somewhere, stay somewhere. And then for whatever reason, the Council decided it was a bad event. The liquor licensing crackdown – all of that stuff happened and then the street party just stopped.
R: So some of the nails in the coffin, we think, going back, started with the street party – a lot of people forget about that but it was a big thing that going. The street parade was cut down. The days were changed from a Friday-Saturday to a Saturday-Sunday – that was a disaster. And no passouts were introduced. Collectively they all became ‘nah, nah, nah’. Going to the Sevens? ‘Nah’. It’s so easy for that to happen. If you analyse the crowds that were there it was a party atmosphere for a great game on the field.
G: It was an adult event. There weren’t children’s tickets – just tickets. If you wanted to take your kids along, you paid $200 to take your kids along.
BT: Do you feel that the decision to move it from an adult event to more of a family event was a bad gamble?
G: Children don’t pay money towards anything.
R: It was a kneejerk thing. The naysayers, the wowsers. We all look back at something and think ‘Oh, I didn’t realise at the time.’ But what’s been happening over the last 3 years, the wowsers have chipped away at this, chipped away at that. So it’s hard to nutshell it. Gradually somebody has gotten their way, over a three year period, and it’s gone from what was an internationally recognised event in Wellington to a situation where 50% of the news about it is bad.
G: They encouraged a family zone where families went, and then people would complain about ‘my ten year old was there, there were these drunk people, and they did all this stuff’. So I never understood why, if you don’t want your children exposed to that, don’t go out on the town at Saturday night at midnight? Why try to cross those two things over?
And the thing is that if you’ve got kids you pack sandwiches and you pack waterbottles, etc.
R: That impacted on the changing of the days from Friday-Saturday to Saturday-Sunday.
BT: Reading through articles from a few years back, you can see how horrific certain incidents were or how people had taken that negative slant. Do you think that perspective taken by the media has completely coloured or influenced the decision to change the event?
G: I used to refuse to listen to talkback for a couple of days after the Sevens. All the people who complained about this and that… and then the announcer would say ‘So you went?’ And they would say ‘Oh no no no, I would never go, I live in Hawkes Bay.’ And as I read recently on a Stuff article on the comments – all the people who complained about the alcohol and this and that – where were they last Sevens? They complained about it, but they had no intention of ever going no matter what the rules were, so why would we let them dictate the event?
BT: I want to separate this out from talking about the experience of the Sevens – because everyone will have a slightly different experience of the Sevens – to focus more on the business, because what this is all about is, you know, what has been the impact on the region and on individual businesses in particular. Talking about the business – it’s a capacity business, so you have to make a certain amount of turnover to help with profitability. Has it had any impact on profitability, or have you had to make any cutbacks as a result of the drop in turnover?
G: We had purchased a lot of items for sale for the Sevens. We used to sell a lot of costumes just for the Sevens. I had to spend a fair bit of money on importing costumes. And I would start researching in September to get the right variety. I didn’t do that at all this year. Three years ago was the last time I did that purposefully with a large number of orders.
We see a lot of people trying to organise 10 of something – sometimes it would be a fresh customer, sometimes someone we’d worked with for years and years – and that just doesn’t happen anymore. It’s definitely been a big downturn in regular customers. All of the customers are from out of town. Wellingtonian locals have thrown in the towel – moreso than regular tourists.
BT: So how many people work for your business?
G: Three of us. At the peak we would have a part-timer. And then we used to have a friend of mine and my sister help out during the Sevens. For Sevens we probably increased it up to 6 people working.
We used to extend our opening hours, be open on a Sunday, and extend returns on a Monday, just to get all of that stuff back – and it would take a whole week to process through all of that washing.
It was probably (equivalent to) a normal month of income over that one weekend. It was the only time of the year you would have that much stuff out at one time.
BT: We’re talking about a stadium with a capacity of 34,500 seats which has gone down to – you know, estimates vary between 10,000 and 15,000 seats actually sold across two days. That’s a pretty massive drop. By my count that adds up to around 20,000 missing tickets. How many of those people would have actually hired costumes?
G: They are down 71% and we have gone down 88%. And the extra percentage is all the people who would never even have bought a ticket to the Sevens, because they didn’t have the money or the funds, but they still wanted to participate in the party.
We probably have a better insight into that than other businesses – the amount of people who went to the party that weren’t at the Sevens. You look at the photos, you can’t tell who was at the Sevens and who wasn’t.
BT: I do find that interesting. I assumed that anyone who was actually going to the length of hiring a costume was buying a Sevens ticket as well.
G: No. The street party is different to the Sevens. It’s a whole event on its own.
R: It’s a dress up event in Courtenay Place as well.
BT: So they killed the street party as well as killing the Sevens.
G: They go hand in hand. If they had still put limitations on at the Sevens in terms of low alcohol etc, but had still kept the street party, I don’t think the impact on the stadium would have been as bad.
We get an email from the Wellington City Council that says what’s happening in Wellington. I received it on a Monday to see what the previous week’s had. And the Wellington Sevens was the fifth thing down. And all it said was Wellington Sevens on Saturday-Sunday – buy tickets here. Which was so different to what the Wellington City Council previously put together.
BT: So a lot of people have speculated as to what the actual cause of the drop in attendance was, whether it’s due to a range of factors or one factor. What do you think is the number one factor that’s driving it?
G: The City Council’s reluctance to have a positive spin and promote the Sevens, in my opinion that has had the biggest impact. We have people who say ‘Oh yep – the Sevens. Is it next weekend?’ and we go ‘No, it’s this weekend.’ And they just didn’t know. People still would have gone to the Sevens, they might have been frustrated with the alcohol situation, but they still would have gone.
R: It became a negative thing to do, and unfortunately it’s very hard to turn that situation around.
BT: The decision to restrict alcohol – how do you think this has affected the culture of the Sevens?
G: I get the impression that if you go to the Sevens you’re a bad person. You’re a bad person because you’re drunk, you’re having a great time. The negatives outweigh the positives.
R: It’s an amalgam of different things. The liquor laws – the Council because they have to apply the liquor laws, a whole raft of factors.
G: No one could criticise making the event safer for people. Police used to be the bouncers and wouldn’t let people in who were too drunk. It worked well.
R: If you trim the hedge too far down, it will die.
BT: To what extent do you think the police had an influence on this decision?
R: The police are the administrators of the liquor laws. How strictly they enforce those liquor laws … I think they over-restricted.
BT: What do you think the Council can learn from this debacle?
R: They can learn about what they’re elected to do, which is boost Wellington and Wellington businesses.
G: They could provide infrastructure and highlight the Sevens. Put some events on that will attract people. Bringing people into the city is a positive thing.
BT: It looks like it costs $274 per ticket, roughly, for both days of the event. But across 20,000 missing tickets that’s a direct loss in revenue of around $5.5 million. So if whoever was in charge of making this decision were to reverse it, and somehow restore the Sevens to what it was before 2014, what would that mean for your business?
R: Great. I would love it from a business perspective, but mostly I would love it for Wellington.
G: I would love it to go back again. I love the people that we serve. They are just so much fun.
