Making progress

It’s been a long but rewarding week with progress being made in several areas. We are gearing up to make quite a few changes in early February, the biggest of these will be the introduction of a new range of products across our brands. A lot of the work which we are doing on product is designed to broaden the appeal of our brands, don’t get me wrong, we don’t have any plans to abandon our traditional customer but we do need to ensure that we have the correct breadth of product for today’s consumer.
A lot of the other things that will be implemented in early February are what I call enablers, they are initiatives which are designed to both simplify what we do and facilitate the gradual improvement of our offer. Many are just common sense solutions to issues which in the past have left our people scratching their heads, puzzled as to why we would do things in that way.
This week also saw our first test shop meeting. Again. I see this initiative as an enabler. Whenever we range a new product our people need to be confident that it is easy to execute and that it will sell which is part of what we are testing. We won’t launch a single new product without it having gone through the test shop process. This week also saw our first range review as we sat down and spent some time making decisions on our home store coffee shop range, what was pleasing was the support I have received from the regional manager who leads the home stores, as engaging with the wider business remains one of my priorities. We have lots of exciting things planned which will hopefully engage the rest if the business which I will talk about over the coming weeks.
Finally, I am out and about today with our learning and development manager and I’m looking forward to seeing outlets which I have yet to visit whilst at the same time understanding more about how we can work on helping out people become the best version of themselves.