As many people reading this will own their own retail business, you will know as well as I do that there are many great things about being your own boss.Holidays are not one of them.
I thought I’d write about my holiday. I’m not going to go into details about my amazing Colosseum sandcastle or the fact I exploded my wine in the freezer (again) – you can see this sort of thing on my Facebook. No, the problem with holidays is that they are very hard to come by as an entrepreneur and even harder to enjoy.
I spent a brief time working for someone else. From 22 to 25 years of age I worked for a company in Hong Kong designing glasses. It was a happy part of my life… well, I’m lucky in that it’s all been happy so far, but in terms of holidays, going away used to be simple.
It was a time to be myself and a time when you could forget everything around you. In those days, there were no smartphones. In 1999, when I bought my first mobile phone and I wouldn’t dare to use data roaming.
Fast forward 20 years (yikes) and no matter where you are in the world, your smartphone is there haunting you, making sure a part of you is not actually on holiday at all. I told my team that this year I was going to have a digital detox and that they should not be expecting any communication from me. ‘In fact, don’t contact me unless it’s really, really urgent. Boss’s orders,’ I said.
But there’s a problem: your phone is also your camera. Every time I whipped my phone out to snap my kids on the beach a WhatsApp message would pop up and ask me for comments on the EssilorLuxottica acquisition of Grandvision or an apologetic text message asking me to please check my email. Which would invariably be something relating to some spectacle disaster or other.
Maybe we could all form a Facebook pressure group and have Apple and Android have an ‘out of office’ mode for your mobile phone, basically, reducing your smartphone into a simple camera that only allows selected contacts to reach you.
When my wife borrowed my phone to look at some of the wonderful family holiday photos, she was shocked to see how many photos of my sunglasses I’d taken for social media. Sunglasses on sandcastle. Sunglasses on Greek wall. Sunglasses on wooden table next to shot of Ouzo. ‘It’s for Instagram,’ I explained. Then there are the selfies; ‘my marketing team made me do it,’ I protested.
But what does a spectacle designer pack to take on holiday? I, of course, packed nine different pairs of sunglasses and in total the family had 24 frames which is completely ridiculous I know, but I wonder how many frames an average optician takes on holiday? I bet there’s quite a few of you taking a similar amount.
Finally, a holiday for me, especially in the summer, is a chance to see if I nailed it on the sunglass trends. It’s easy to see what shapes we are selling in our own retail stores and to opticians, but what are people from all over the world wearing this year?
I can stare at crowds of holiday makers for hours and hours. Their ages, the frame shapes, colours, choices they made. I saw one particular Ray-Ban (a cat’s eye and Wayfarer hybrid) seemingly worn by hundreds of people which made me sick - because not only had I not seen that frame before (it looked fantastic) but I totally missed that trend.
Back in London, yesterday, I slipped into work mode like I’d never been away, which frankly I might as well not have been thanks to my phone.
I’d like to finish this month’s column with some positive holiday advice, words of wisdom for the small business owner: learn from my mistakes. I’d very much like to but if you have any tips, perhaps drop me a quick email. I’d love to know.