Monday was my day to shine. I was in at half 7 to get a head start on the work. I was looking to do a good job   and make sure all the reports were exact. I worked my way through each of the reports checking as I went.

Open publication - Free publishing - More monday

With getting into work so early I managed to get the reports finished just before lunch so I set the presentation pack to print as I popped out to get some lunch so that when I returned I have time to staple the packs all together and get them distributed before the trade meeting at 2.

The trade packs went down well in the meeting without any mistakes which I was pleased about as I had been very careful as I know how important it is for the reports to be exact.

In the trade meeting it was discussed why Animal is down on sales in the year. The one thing that was mentioned is that the VM is not the reason for the stores not performing as the sales are coming in from the garments hung in the prime VM positions. Both the Retail Manger Nikki and the Area Manager Cat travel around a lot of stores each week to make sure the stores are presentable and the VM is there to entice customers.

Personally in my time at Animal I have gotten to know where the stores are located and for me location is key. Many of their stores are off the main strip of shopping town centres so the footfall passing the shop is not there. From my own observations I believe that the location of stores are not in the key areas they should be and with sales on the retail side not performing I think what should be done is that they close most if not all of their stores, they focus on their wholesale and build up the brand again and then pick a few key locations to be re-opened making Animal a brand to be desired and people visit the locations for the stores.
I know that it is easy for me to conclude this and that in principle it is a much bigger job but I think it needs to be done now while there are still customers following the brand before they loose their market and they then have to build up the customers again from scratch.

On Tuesday I came into work but was not feeling 100%.  I ran thought the best seller reports for top 10 units and for etail and saved these down to PDF's to be sent across to Chloe Crosby to be sent out to retail and I also saved PDF's of the cut down version to be sent to the finance manager Richard Bouch.


As I was not feeling too well I left work at lunch to go home to rest so that I could be feeling better for the following day. Unfortunately I went home and was off most of the week Ill. I think it may have been largely down to the previous week and having a lot of stress with my partner having surgery. 


On Friday I was back at work and I had my usual job of prepping mondays reports. Once I had done this I was sent up to Product Development in design by Nathan to help with clearing the SS12 samples to the archive area. For this job I was assisting the Junior Garment Developer, Katie. The job itself was just a simple one of putting the clothing into order of what company made the sample and then to transport it to the 4th floor for it to be hung in archiving so it was still available to review as needed by design. The main challenge came when we came to move the rails of clothing and we found there was no lift between the 3rd and 4th floor so it was then a lot of manual work to shift it. I saw this as a good bit of exercise and got stuck straight in.