Having achieved a lot in a short period of time, Junkyard Golf Club was stopped in its tracks due to the global pandemic. Now, as the company gets ready to open its doors once again, RLI speaks with Managing Director Sam Jones about how the company will be adapting its offering to customers upon re-opening and what the future looks like for the brand.
A young brand with a fast growing reputation, Junkyard Golf Club was voted second in the Fast Track 100 league table by The Times in 2019 and before Covid-19 the business was set to expand rapidly.
Across its current five permanent sites in the UK, the concept offers a unique opportunity to get your fix of neon lights, golf courses like you’ve never seen before and all the strange and innovative cocktails you could ask for.
Four of the five sites, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Oxford are set to re-open on 3 August, while the group’s fifth site in London will open a week later on 10 August. Prior to the London location becoming a permanent one, the company ran a pop-up in Shoreditch for two years.
Due to the ongoing effects of Covid-19 on the leisure industry, Junkyard Golf Club’s doors have been shut for almost five months and the team are now counting the days until they can re-open and welcome guests back to their courses.
After having no revenue coming in for such a sustained period of time, the group’s plans moving forward have obviously been altered.
“Our strategic plan was to open either three or four sites over the next calendar year and in 2021 we had deals done on two additional sites,” explains Sam Jones, Managing Director of Junkyard Golf Club. “At the current moment it is just not feasible for us to do this so we have stepped back from that plan and we will now instead consolidate the sites we already have and look to open one site in Newcastle towards the back end of next year.”
As the company looks towards re-opening, the biggest issue they currently have is handling the demand of people who want to get back into the crazy worlds and courses the company have created, whilst at the same time fulfilling the social distancing regulations and making sure everyone, staff and guests alike are safe and feel safe when on-site.
In the venues themselves, guests are now hosted when they arrive rather than people making their own way to the course when they are ready as it was before, there is also app ordering in place at the tables for food and drinks, the timings of when people arrive versus when they go onto the courses has been changed, some small tweaks have been made on the courses themselves but Jones explains that the major changes have been in customer areas where there is now Perspex on the bars, a dedicated cleaning schedule and all the things people would expect when they revisit.
“Our transition from lockdown to re-opening is essentially two-fold, firstly it has been the physical changes we’ve made in the sites to change the operation and then it is also ourselves amending our expectation of what we can actually do under the social distancing rules to fulfil the demand that is there,” Jones says.
When speaking about the company and its position before Covid-19 struck, it becomes apparent just how many changes the business has had to go through in recent months. Beforehand, the business had just had its best 12 months in existence and was planning to open ten sites over the next three years in major cities such as Cardiff, Birmingham and a second London site. International expansion was even beginning to become a real possibility and discussions with partners were taking place.
However now, a lot of this has had to be put on hold until the world begins to return to something resembling ‘normal’, and the company is instead looking to sustain the business with the locations that it has in place and continue with the Newcastle opening next year, which will be its only new site in the foreseeable future.
The rise of social media and in particular Instagram has been of massive significance for Junkyard Golf Club and its core customer base. “Although we are not limited to, our core advertising spend goes on Millennials and Generation Z consumers as these are the people who live on their phones and are always on the lookout for their next Insta worthy photo,” explains Jones.
When discussing the key drivers behind the quick success of the brand Jones explains: “It may sound cliché, but really it is just a fantastic product that is fun for anyone. It is a welcoming environment and it has a very low entry level, you don’t need to be good at golf to come and enjoy the crazy golf we have on offer.”
Looking to the months ahead, Jones says that the business is well equipped to ride out the coming period of lower sales due to less people being allowed on-site at any given time, but freely admits there are still challenges ahead.
“The challenges we know and can plan for are things such as consumer confidence around safety post-Covid-19, consumer confidence around spending in these difficult times as people need to be more careful with their money and of course staff safety,” Jones says.
“I would say the biggest risk to us in the coming months is a blanket regional lockdown happening in any of the cities in which we operate, we really can’t plan for that but we feel we have the tools, the knowledge and have prepared as well as we can to ride out these challenges and begin building this business back up again.”
