The sales team at Caroline Gardner are already thinking about Christmas, as they started mailing out Christmas catalogues. Then there were AW17 proofs to sign off and drinks to celebrate the start of the new financial year. Luca Bridges, senior sales and marketing coordinator tells the story of last week.
Monday
We had a very busy start to our week, which is always a good sign for an eventful week! We spent the morning putting on the orders that we received over the weekend. We have just launched our May release of Totally Tropical cards so we are seeing lots of these lovely new cards coming through on our orders. Monday is always a great admin day clearing through your email inbox.
We also started the mail out for our Christmas 2017 catalogues; we received the delivery last week of something along the lines of 74 boxes of catalogues. So Monday involved letter printing and starting the process of our mail out, which we will continue to do over the week when we get a quiet moment…
Tuesday
We are exhibiting at the Harrogate Home & Gift show in July, so in preparation for the show we do a lot of work on marketing. This morning we have submitted images of newly launched and upcoming product, updated our online profile where we explain the new ranges we will have on display and completed the PR questionnaire for the organisers to use.
In the afternoon we popped over to Pulse at Olympia which isn’t too far from our head offices in Parsons Green. We like to visit the shows we don’t exhibit at in case we find a new one we think we should be exhibiting at.
Wednesday
Today our AW17 cards were signed off which is very exciting, we love looking through all the new designs we have to come. This launch is particularly exciting as we are bringing out six new ranges with a total of 79 cards. We are also bringing in some fantastic new finishes, so watch this space. The morning was spent mocking up the brand new cards to take to a customer meeting tomorrow, they are seriously hot off the press!
In the afternoon we had our company meeting to review the previous year and what we have to look forward to for this year. We were given a presentation on all the new products we have coming up in the July launch. We cannot wait to start selling the new accessories and stationery. We got to leave a little early and popped to our local with [company owners] Caroline [Gardner], Angus [Gardner] and the rest of the team to celebrate the new financial year with some prosecco.
Thursday
For our two big gift launches we put together gift collections/stories to make shopping easier for our customers. It’s an easy one tick shop, plus they benefit from getting the products in smaller unit sizes. So we spent the morning mocking up these collections. It’s great fun – you team new products and bestselling items and see how they sit together. We have three fantastic new looks; Wanderlust, Paint the Town Red and Good as Gold.
Now the final collections have been built all the product is ready to be photographed, so our in-house photographer pulls together all the samples and props to start snapping away.
Friday
To finish our working week we have been testing our new to be launched USA wholesale website. It’s looking fabulous, we hope to have it up and running in the next week or so.
The rest of Friday was a day out on the road at customer meetings plus a few store visits. We like to pop in and see our customers where possible so when we’re out at meetings it’s a great opportunity.
