Our Price

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Our Price was a chain of record stores in the United Kingdom from the 1970s until the late 1990s. Originally founded in 1972 by Gary Nesbitt, Edward Stollins and Mike Isaacs, early stores were branded "The Tape Revolution" and concentrated on the then-new compact cassette format.

The name was changed to "Our Price Records" in the mid-1970s; then to "Our Price Music" (reflecting the growth in the tape and compact disc formats) in the mid-1980s; and then simply to "Our Price" following a final brand relaunch in 1993.

The company was based in London, with a head office above the shop in High Street, Kensington. It initially focused on the committed rock album buyer, with regular imports of "cut-out" US albums, a remainder store on Charing Cross Road branded Surplus Records, and a mail-order business driven by advertising in the music press. These different routes to market fell away after the core chain grew exponentially in 1980 with the purchase of the Harlequin Records chain. Thereafter, national expansion followed, with the 100th store opening in the Kings Road, Chelsea; the 200th at Stirling, Scotland; and the 300th in the early 1990s in Brixton, south London.

In the first half of the 1980s, Our Price established itself as the UK's second largest retailer of records and tapes (with Woolworths at number 1). Brand recognition was driven by pun-rich radio advertising built around the "Get Down To Our Price" slogan, which later transferred to TV featuring an animated carrier bag called Billy. A sister chain, Our Price Video, was established to capitalise on the success of the new VHS tape format, and some towns eventually had two or three Our Price-branded stores. Our Price Video was later rebranded under the "Playhouse" fascia, but failed to establish a significant market share in VHS sales, and it was wound up by WH Smith in the late 1990s. (The otherwise unconnected Silver Screen retail chain was founded on the same "specialist movies" principle in the early 2000s; it too foundered, and has now closed down.)

However, an expansion programme by Thorn-EMI-owned HMV in the late 1980s established a chain of newer, larger stores, which threatened and eventually overtook Our Price in popularity.

Our Price was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1984, and then acquired by WH Smith Group plc three years later, with Smith's "Sound FX" chain absorbed into Our Price. The corporate environment - in addition to its high street chain, WH Smith also owned the Do-It-All DIY chain, Sherratt & Hughes booksellers and other businesses - changed Our Price fundamentally, and several members of senior management left the company in 1989 to create the rival MVC (Music & Video Club), which itself would eventually be bought by Woolworths. WH Smith later bought a majority interest in Richard Branson's Virgin Music retail chain, a move which (with both Our Price and Virgin brands combined) would push them back ahead of HMV, but WH Smith sold Virgin, along with Our Price, to a division of the Virgin group of companies a few years later.

After this takeover, the Our Price name began to be dropped in favour of the Virgin name, or VShop. The VShop continued to sell videos, DVDs and CDs, but concentrated equally on selling Virgin branded mobile phones, with stores removing the bulk of back catalogue CDs from display with the aim that customers could order these in store for home delivery through dedicated computer terminals in a so called 'clicks and mortar' strategy to combine high street shopping with the emerging internet shopping phenomenon. It lost out to competitors in the fields of music and mobile phones to competitors such as The Link, The Carphone Warehouse, HMV and MVC, while the increasing popularity of internet shopping rendered the in store ordering terminals redundant.

Virgin Group, while maintaining their megastores, sold the VShops and the remaining stores still under the "Our Price" brand on to Brazin Limited in 2001, a major Australian music retailer, who operates the Virgin, Sanity and, from 2006, HMV music store brands in that territory. Brazin re-branded all the stores as "Sanity", a move which cost over 8 million pounds. Sanity never took off in the UK. In 2002 they announced a plan to trade in the UK under two names, their current one and a re-launch of the Our Price name (which continued to have resonance with UK consumers). This never happened and the stores closed the following year, with Brazin concentrating on the Australian market.

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