Phase 3

As the seasons change, so does the world around us. And in the world of retail, new season, equals new clothes! It is just after Christmas we start to see an injection of colour and shorter sleeves in amongst the isles of knitwear and gloomy greys in the stockroom. It's  refreshing to see and our minds start ticking thinking about how we are going to turn the shop floor beneath us from a winter wonderland into a summer boutique!
We are currently doing our phase 3 change. We have 5 phases a year morphing gradually into spring summer to high summer to autumn winter and so on. A lot more colour, tribal prints and pastel tones seem to be hot for phase 3.
We receive photographic guidelines from head office a few days prior to rolling out the phase change. These contain pictures of perimeters and centre floor equipment from a mock up shop displaying each top and pair of trousers we recieve in our deliveries in a certain place within a certain range. We then plan it onto our own shop floor layout and adapt it to suit keeping to their very strict rules and regulations. That's the easy part.
Changing stock to the new layout certainly isn't easy. It basically involves stripping the shop floor bare wall by wall and using your plans to create the new look and feel given by head office. We are given two days to complete phase moves. I have worked through the night, been in at 5AM and stopped until 11PM to achieve the finished result on time.
It's very tiring but you get such a nice feeling when stood at the top of the ladders having put up your last graphic display looking over the new shop floor in all it's glory.

Why I Chose to Write This Blog..

So, why did I decide to write a blog about my job? Well, for 3 years now I have been working for a very popular high street fashion store. Little did I know that when I embarked on this journey that the job would consist of so much, I mean that in a literal and emotional sense.
I love my job, the people I work with and the new faces that I meet everyday, but very early on I realised there is alot more to working in a shop than standing behind the tills, which I truely believe is the british highsteet shoppers impression of my job and what it entails.
So I guess this blog is to educate you, shoppers, into my life and that of my collegues as to what really goes on behind the smiles and folding of clothes at the tillpoint.