Kathryn Smith's Blog

This week at Arabella we have opened the new store! This has been a new experience for the whole team as we can now all work in the same building at once, this has meant that cooperating as a team is far easier. I have been largely involved in the online side of the business hence, I handle the orders, emails and phone calls downstairs whilst the customers are handled by the sales team upstairs. However, now we are all working in the same space if the sales team need help I can assist them. 

This week at Arabella we have been rather busy focusing on the instore experience. As we are due to reopen on the 12th, we are re-merchandising the collections and window displays. Now we have moved into the new store it is highly important that we elevate our experience and aesthetic, we want the customers to feel that we have developed the Arabella experience. 

ADDITIONAL RESEARCH Twitter 'fleets' update To help people feel more comfortable Twitter have been working on a lower pressure way for people to talk about what’s happening. This fleets feature allows users to produce a tweet that is only visible for 24 hours, this means that users feel less pressure to get retweets and likes. This is not however a feature i can see us using at Arabella as we don't use Twitter. Yet, if we were to the fleets feature could allow for more customer interaction and engagement with our business as people aren't too worried about their comments. I believe that Twitter establishing this feature does suggest that social media platforms are becoming too similar as it reflects the story feature on both Instagram and Facebook.

ARABELLA This week at Arabella, I became a fully fledged member of the team. I received a promotion to ‘Director’s assistant’ this means I will work with the senior team and contribute to decision making tasks. This ensures I am also able to work in several roles and see which suits me best as to if I want to progress further in the business and become more specialised in my role.

ARABELLA This week at Arabella following many new arrivals and new stock we had a large amount of orders to send out to customers. Hence we all came together as a team to ensure the quality of these didn’t change due to the quantity. As these are such high quality pieces we must ensure the customer is getting the standard they are paying for.

ARABELLA This week at Arabella, we continued with our buying appointments. Even though we are only now receiving Spring/Summer stock we are already making orders for our Autumn/Winter collections. Rundholz is one of our best selling brands and the brand we stock the most of, their buying appointment is hence the most important. When looking through the stock we must not only look thinking of our own taste but also the taste of our customers and our brand aesthetic. We struggled more with this buying appointment than any before, as this collection was abroad and due to travel restrictions we weren’t able to see the pieces in person. We instead had to view them online and make decisions purely on pictures of the garments. Hence we will have to wait until the arrival of these pieces in August to see how well this collection goes.