A Day in the Life of a Retail Assistant #68 Hi everyone, it has been a very productive week here in Norfolk, we have seen many of our favourite customers as well as plenty of holiday makers.
On Monday, as always there were lots of online orders to pick! However Josh and I got through them quickly and by the afternoon we were onto new tasks. I started by creating a new advertising image for the monitors in our humidor, I chose to use J Cure products, they have some amazing hand crafted lighters and cigar cases – I have never seen such high quality products. At the moment they are 10% off in the Norfolk store only! So if that isn’t a reason to come down I don’t know what is! Afterwards I decided to change the design of our price tags. Before they were hand written, meaning if someone (like myself) had bad handwriting, it would be difficult to understand, now they are printed and look so much better. Creating the design was difficult, I was discussing it with my manager and creating different designs to see what she thought was best. I think we have made a great decision.
On Tuesday, I was back in the shop with Porscha! It had been a long time since we have worked together in the shop and we had a great time! I showed her how to make the new tags for pricing and she swiftly made a start on pricing up the pipe room. Meanwhile I started on my marketing tasks. Unfortunately this week due to staff holidays I was unable to dedicate a day to this so I did it in between serving customers. I wrote an article for the C.Gars cigar library, it was about the Drew Estate Tabak Especial, which you can read here. The Tabak range has become a favourite amongst the newer staff here, including myself, so I decided to research what went into the process and it really is fascinating! Make sure you read all about it! I took some time to take the pictures for it too, luckily Porscha was able to look after the shop by herself. I also wrote a news piece for the new La Gloria Turquinos, since the release of the Medaille d’Or No. 4, La Gloria has been incredibly sought after and now with the exciting release of the Turquinos, the hype has gotten larger. Later on in the day I served a gentleman who only wanted 20 minutes smokes, this can be quite difficult as there aren’t many smaller cigars that aren’t cigarillos. We had a look through the humidors and decided upon the Inka Secret Blend Red Chicos, Casa Turrent 1880 Maduro Coronita and the Tabak Oscuro. Hopefully I get to see him again so he can let me know if he enjoyed them.
Thursday was a rather strange day. I started in the shop, picking online orders with Josh, once I completed them, Sarah became available so I moved out of the shop and concentrated on more marketing tasks. We have a very exciting development at the moment which is the focus of our marketing department, We will have our very first C.Gars magazine coming out very soon! And I play my part too, I will be writing two articles which won’t be available online, as well as a general cigar news page and then in the afternoon, we had a meeting to discuss further. At the meeting all of marketing put forward their ideas and looked at everyone’s effort and suggested ways to help improve. I also served a great gentleman who was completely new to cigars, he was given a Cohiba from a friend but upon cutting, it fell apart. When I had a look it was very obvious that the cigar was fake! I had never seen a fake Cohiba in person! So I was amazed to see how bad it was! We looked around the humidors and I was helping him decide which cigars to try for a first time, he decided on the Montecristo No. 4, Regius Orchant Seleccion Peru 2023 Wide Churchill and the Tabak Especial Toraja. Afterwards he mentioned that he loved whisky and so Sarah and I showed him the Stalla Dhu range and let him try the Speyside, Islay and C.Gars malt. He enjoyed all three so I said he could take one of each miniatures for the special price of £9.99! He was overjoyed! He left so happy and was really looking forward to trying them all.
On Friday, I was working in the packing department for the first time in a very long time! For those who know me, know I started in the packing department in 2019 and have since moved onto to running the shop and the C.Gars cigar library as well as much more. This time I was working with Porscha, I packed as quick as I could, however my pace isn’t what it once was. As a team we got through it successfully with all orders going out.
On Saturday, It was Porscha, Josh and I, picking all of the online orders and having a general stock up on products. Josh spent plenty of time depluming the cigars to make them look pristine.
I hope you have enjoyed this weeks going on in store and I hope to see you all very soon
So long for now
Oliver
