When Bob Rybick, his brother Andrew, and their cousins Eric and Ryan Nilsson took over Geissler’s Supermarkets, the small chain founded by their great-grandfather in 1923, they’d already had a chance to think hard about how they wanted to grow the business. Their parents’ generation had expanded Geissler’s to seven stores in Connecticut and Massachusetts. The new generation decided to concentrate on using technology to draw more people to those stores.
Their first obstacle was the pandemic, which came along about a year after the transition.
At first, they concentrated on getting products on the shelves and in the hands of customers. Home delivery has always been part of the Geissler’s business model since the beginning — Adolph Geissler would make deliveries in his Model T — but Rybick realized that customers were gravitating toward online competitors, who were better equipped to make last-minute deliveries.
He decided that working with those services was a better strategy than fighting them. “The market is fragmented now,” he said. “Our approach is not being afraid of having multiple partners and in multiple places.” He sees it as offering customers more choices: Instacart may be faster, but Geisslers.com offers better prices.
The same philosophy guided them when they chose a POS — and then chose a different one a year later because they realized that a system that promised to do everything didn’t do everything well. “The evolution of tech makes it possible to focus on one thing in particular, like ecommerce or loyalty,” Rybick said. “That’s what we were looking for.”
New tech has also allowed them to focus their advertising efforts. In the past, Geissler’s used zip codes to determine ad sales areas, but Rybick found that because Geissler’s stores tend to be on the borders of towns, that data wasn’t very accurate. Instead, the team began working with the ADvay Media Group, which used demographic data combined with the store’s email and loyalty lists to target customers more precisely, with less advertising waste.
Even with targeted advertising, Rybick realized that the team had to keep pushing the Geissler’s story of a family business with high-quality groceries and prepared meals, even if it felt like they’d already repeated the message a thousand times.
And so Rybick, Eric Nilsson, and other employees began making regular appearances on the store’s social media, promoting sales items, introducing the local farmers who grow their produce, and filming “What’s On Bob’s Plate,” a semi-regular series in which Rybick cooks dinner with groceries from the store.
Geissler’s will continue to evolve. Currently, the store is in the process of installing touchscreen-enabled smart carts. In the future, using cameras and AI, the carts will display customized ads based on previous purchases. Geissler’s is the first store in both Connecticut and Massachusetts to use the system, and Rybick is excited.
“Instead of spending money on Google or Amazon,” he says, “we’ll spend our money where retail is actually happening.”
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This feature is part of our 2024 “SN Independent Superstars” list: see more superstars here.