Monday 9^th February 2009, was the first day back in store, having got there nice and early, I had the builders there waiting for me, they were giving the front of the store a proper face lift. It was very dirty, had plants growing out of the walls and needed a bit of attention. I remember, at this time only having a key for the back of the store, as the full set of keys hadn’t been given back to us yet. This meant for some fun, as I then had to run through the store to get to the front to turn the alarm off!

It was quite an emotional feeling going back into the store, it didn’t quite feel real. We had closed only a month earlier and here we were about to embark on a re-opening. I remember walking around the very empty and hollow sounding store, wondering what this was all going to look like once we had set it back up. I actually felt really excited about this!

I walked around the whole of the store, checking it all over. The store may have only been empty for a month, but we had had some very bad weather in that time and there were a few puddles around the place, but nothing that couldn’t be easily sorted and the builders were already starting on this.

During the first week, the priority was to work out how we wanted the store to be set up. We knew that we wanted a very different feel from the way it had been as Woolworths, we had always thought it felt claustrophobic, so we wanted to give it more of an open and airy feel.

It was also the week to plan what we needed to achieve to open the store on time, we had already gone along way to getting the stock at the Spring fair, but what else did we need? The first thing was a computer and Epos system. One of the Landlords colleagues strength was in systems, so he came over to help us with this side of things and started contacting companies to see what we would need. It was also just getting all the basics in the store, we had no phone line, internet and we needed to get all the utilities organised. It was like moving into a new house.

In this first week there was obviously a lot of interest in what was going on in the store, but we were not ready to tell the outside world what was happening…………… yet. 

Why the name Wellworths you may ask, well the owner is Irish and Wellworths had been a trading name over there, we had spent over a week brainstorming in the early days for a name and failed to find anything that felt right, one day the landlord mentioned the name Wellworths as an idea. I must admit at first I wasn’t sure, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it and wanted to go with it. We gave the name to a company to do our branding and what we got back was just perfect.

So that is where it all started!! I hope you have enjoyed the beginning of the Wellworths story and the next blogs will be about the set up before we opened.

Next time “5 weeks to set up”

I promised them all on that day that….

…I would keep in contact and help them in everyway possible to get a new job. So once a week I would ring each of them and make sure we were all ok. These could be quite emotional calls as I still felt like we were a family.        

In the meantime I was still in regular contact with the landlord and it was finally in the 3^rd week of January that I finally got the call i’d been waiting for, that we had the go ahead to set up the store. I immediately rang all the staff and spoke to them about the plans, a few had already got new jobs, but out of the 25 staff that left 21 including myself were coming back! That was a great moment, beng able to tell them that we were going to have our store back.

We immediately went out to find a buyer, the one job that we needed to cover that we didn’t have in store already. I had lots of applications, but most didn’t have the experience and we needed someone who could start straight away and know what to look for and where to look. I had already found out about the Spring Fair, retail trade fair at the NEC in Birmingham which was at the beginning of February, so we needed someone for then.

We hired Daniel Roy and went off to Birmingham, what an experience going for the first time, it was like being a kid in a sweet shop. There were 20 halls filled with stands of everything you could ever think of and I didn’t know where to start! We worked our way around and with a plan of what we wanted to find, were very successful in finding what we needed. This was the week before we got our first access back into the store on Monday 9^th February…

I loved working for Woolworths, I loved the variety of the job. I had always said if I left Woolworths I would get out of retail. I couldn’t see myself working for another retailer. I wasn’t keen on going to work in a supermarket and I couldn’t see myself working in something that didn’t have the variety. The next part of the conversation with the landlord was one of those that will always stick out. We were talking about what would happen next and he asked ‘if the store closes, do you think you could set up something similar independently’ I took all of about 5 seconds to say ‘of course I could’ to be fair at that moment it seemed a throw away comment, but as we left my office we both knew it was something we would definitely be looking into.

From that day on, I spoke to him every day, keeping up on Woolworth’s closing activities, but also looking at the possibility of putting our plan into action. He asked me if I could put a business plan together for it? Ok a business plan I thought, how the heck do I do one of those then?! It wasn’t really something I had to do in Woolworths, so I started to trawl the internet and speak to some key people that I thought could help me and started to build the plan as well as a SWOT analysis. This I finally finished on the 31^st December and sent it to the landlord. The next few days were a bit of a blur. We were in the batch of stores to close on Woolworths last trading day of the 6^th January. That was hard, I didn’t tell most of my staff about the plans, as I didn’t want to get their hopes up, if it didn’t come to anything, but I was very much there to try and support them through a very challenging time. I remember on the last day we were all in tears, it was a heart renching moment when I closed the door for the very last time. It didn’t quite seem real. When we left that night we didn’t want to leave the store, as much because we didn’t want to leave each other. We were a family.

We did have one last day all together in the store on the 8^th of January when we had to all fill in our redundancy paperwork. We had a pizza party in the store and tried to bring a bit of fun to the day and ended up in the pub, all drowning our sorrows.

I promised them all on that day that….

I will never forget the phone call I got on the 5^th December….

… from the landlord of the building whom I had briefly met some 18 months earlier when he had bought the building. He asked questions about the Woolworths situation, but I was unable to answer many of his questions as I didn’t really know what was going on. So he decided to come and visit the store and then speak to the administrators.

When he came to visit with a colleague, he had a good look around Dorchester before meeting me and saw straight away that there was vibrancy about the town and very few empty shops. Our store is in the centre of a pedestrian shopping street. We started to have a talk about the town and the store and how it performed as Woolworths. Every year Dorchester store – 0403 - was near the top stores in the area for sales and profit. We went on to talk about what would happen to the store if it closed (this hadn’t been confirmed at the time) and the answer was we didn’t know, also we talked about what would I do, again I didn’t know!

 In my store at the time, we stayed pretty upbeat, we were not going to close! Woolworths was a High street institution, we would all be fine. Wouldn’t we? There were many big names linked with trying to save us namely the then Sir Alan Sugar and Theo Paphitis, but they seemed to walk away quite quickly. Woolworths was a very complex business and it seemed that people were not interested even in picking up the good parts of the business. This is when in store we started to worry. If no-one wanted to save us than it was looking like the worst possible senario! On the 11th December 2008, jobs had started to be axed from head office and on the 17^th we started a closing down sale. This was the hardest process at store level I have ever had to go through. Trying to keep my staff upbeat and keep them doing their jobs, not only knowing that it looked like we would be losing our jobs, but because it was Christmas. We were all heartbroken, this was OUR store and we felt a part of it, I had a couple of staff who had worked in the store for over 30 years and a number who had done over 20! This wasn’t just about Woolworths it was like breaking up the family. I know this was the same feeling echoed across most of the 811 stores up and down the country!

I will never forget the phone call I got on the 5^th December….

20^th October 1990, my first day with Woolworths! As a 15 year old it was my first Saturday job and I loved it. From the start, I found the interaction with people and the fact every day brought something new was fascinating. In August of 1994 I was asked by my Manager at the time Paul Eales if I would like to go to an assessment centre to become a trainee Assistant Manager. I passed and that was the first role that took me to Dorchester. Over the next 14 years I had many roles and went to a number of different stores, 1109 Chard, 0089 Poole and 1106 New Milton to name a few, going back to Dorchester on a few occasions, but finally coming back in the February of 2004 to become the Store Manager. During this time I had my son Daniel and in 2006 I had my daughter Alice.

That’s a very very brief overview of my Woolworths days, but I’m sure I will write about that in more detail another day. What I can say is that the company went through a lot of changes in that time, the demerger from Kingfisher in 2001 and although I can definitely say that I never imagined that Woolworths would one day not be on the High Street, I could see things were not going well. As managers we felt we had lost all control of our stores and were just managing check lists! Directed to do all task’s from Head office. It was hugely frustrating. As it got close to 26^th November 2008 when the shares were suspended, at store level we didn’t really have a clue what was going on. We were having daily conference calls to try and stop our concerns, but we all knew something wasn’t right. Even when we got to the 26^th, we were very much kept in the dark. I remember having to Google Woolworths and getting more news from various sources on the internet than from internal sources.

 Tommorow - “The hardest Days…”

So when I started Wellworths over 2 years ago I never imagined that I would go through the roller coaster that has been the last 2 years - I really want to write about some of my experiences and some of the challenges that I have had to face and have been through, of which I am still going through.

It has been an incredible time and I am often asked to share my experiences, so I thought why not try blogging about it so that I can pass on and share my experiences with you all. Now you will have to forgive me as blogging is a steep learning curve for me and have never been the best at writing things down, but I am going to give it a try…!

So please look out for my first story: “Why Wellworths” which will be posted next week.

Warm regards,

Claire.

PS. If you have any questions you would like to ask me then please feel free to ask away.

http://www.woolworthsreunited.com/Wellworths/GiveItSomeWelly.html

http://www.woolworthsreunited.com/Wellworths/Index.html