Hands up if you are enjoying this lovely weather? What a wonderful Easter. Rejoice and embrace all the fantastic things we have. As my current favourite song from Monty Python says, “always look on the bright side of life”. I don’t want to spend my 700 words adding to your daily gloom.
But it’s so hard to be positive at the moment. I’ve got to recognise how difficult this is or you will think I’m crazy, so let me get the negativity out the way.
This is only the third day I’ve worked from home as mostly I’ve gone into the factory to work. I had my speech ready for the police if they stopped me: ‘I have over £1m of stock in the building. I want to check if everything is OK,’ ‘It’s a 1930s building, there could be leaking taps’ or ‘It’s part of my daily exercise, officer.’ It’s only a short bike ride from my home, after all.
It’s almost three weeks since I closed down the factory. The first few times I came in, it was like when I often come in at the weekend. Not much of an issue. But as the weeks have crept by and the dust settled on the floor and furniture all the energy in the building seemed to seep away.
I found myself looking around at reminders of activity and life of my staff. Little things upset me. Casey’s boots peeking out under her desk, waiting for their master’s return. Sarah’s hot water bottle still on her chair (it was still cold last month) and the silent cuckoo clock that Jake winds each morning.
I’ve eaten everyone’s food from the fridge. I’m starting to run out of coffee and I’ve stolen all the wine from the bar. But coming into work was wonderful. As close to routine and normality as possible and better than sitting at home worrying we’ve been broken into.
The first week I was working away. All the usual stuff: sorting out the mess from global tradeshow cancellations; furloughing staff; closing my retail stores; creating disaster spreadsheets. Talking to lawyers around the world for staff issues and reopening the logistics office I’d just closed.
There were moments where I couldn’t see how to escape. I kept hearing Han Solo from Star Wars saying: ‘I don’t know how we are going to get out of this one kid!’
I thought, ‘What do I need to do right now? I can’t plan for three months’ time or six months’ time. What can I do this week?’ I wanted to let as many people as possible know we were temporarily closed but still here. I got a bit fed up with emails like ‘due to Covid-19’ etc, and I wanted my customers around the world to see the brand in action and still going.
I decided to run a competition to design and make frames. Hundreds of people entered and I personally made the three winners. The films I published were watched over 10,000 times across all platforms. It was genuinely amazing.
Making the frames again was actually very difficult for me. My film edits might have made it look easy, but I had to throw away five frames for each successful product. What would have taken one of my guys a day, took me a week. But I loved it. Once I’d done one thing positive for the business, other positive actions were easy to get in motion.
I set about cost cutting. This is horrible because it involves people’s lives. It also involves dismantling things you have spent years building and nurturing. But it’s only when you are faced with a cliff edge that you can make some of these tough decisions. Once they are made, you feel better and secretly wonder if you should have done it years ago anyway.
Conversations with my management team have turned away from doom and disaster to planning for the autumn tradeshows, new collection launches and who’s going to Tesco to stock up the factory’s bar.
It’s not going to be easy this year. We all need to take one step at a time and make it a bloody good one. Then remember this: no matter what happens, people will always need glasses. So, let’s make sure it’s us selling to them.