9-10 AM:
When we arrive the first port of call is checking all of our emails and phone messages to see if we have had any trade or retail orders come in through the night. We might end up calling some of our trade customers back because we like having a good chat (many of them have been our customers for years, and some of them are even the children of our original customers that have taken over the business!) and we can tell them exactly what we’ve got that they’ll like. Richard is ever the salesman.
10-11 AM:
Brew time. Then, we run around the warehouse handpicking the items for both our retail and our trade customers. This means we get to personally inspect the items that our customers are getting, so we can be sure that they meet our exacting standards. For trade orders, next comes the boring part: typing up an invoice.
11-12 PM:
We’ll spend the next hour packing all of your orders up. Our trade customer’s orders get put into our reused cardboard boxes which will then typically be plastered with masking tape as many of these orders have to make the arduous journey up to the Highlands and other such remote areas. Smaller retail orders will be sealed up nice and tight in an opaque sealed plastic bag, but larger orders will find themselves in the same cardboard boxes as our trade business.
Once we’re sure we’ve got all your items, we’ll arrange to send on the same day. Either via a courier pick up for large items, or via a short drive to our local Post Office in Austwick or Settle for smaller items.
12-1 PM:
We tend to use this hour to catch up on our bookkeeping. We’ll note down all the orders we’ve taken from the morning into our accountancy book and make sure all our trade customers’ invoices are sealed up in envelopes and ready to be dropped off at the post office later.
1-2 PM:
Lunch time! We’ll close up the shop for 45 minutes to an hour whilst heading up home, buying a sandwich in the village shop or going to one of our favourite local cafes to grab a bite to eat.
2-3 PM:
After lunch is a great time to catch up on all those essential parts of the business which may sometimes fall by the wayside in the morning rush to get orders out. Edward will often focus on the more “techy” stuff like checking our online marketing, IT, strategy and posting on our social media. Richard will normally be tucked away in the back of our warehouse trimming sheepskins; a skill he has perfected over his lifetime of experience in the wool and sheepskin industry, or liasing directly with our many supply chains for our product range to ensure everything is on track, from Yorkshire woollen mills, to sheepskin tanneries and Portuguese outworkers. Justina is in control of the finances, a vital role that she closely manages, as long as it doesn’t interfere with listening to the Archers on Radio 4 at 2pm.
3-4 PM:
We might use this hour to get our creative juices flowing and put together another blog for you lovely people to read. This hour can consist of a lot of head scratching, googling and doodling.
4-5 PM:
We’re on a bit of a wind down to home-time now so this hour is perfect to get all those fiddly little jobs done like counting out and packaging chamois demisters, size labelling our baby booties or packing our woollen insoles. It’s always good to dedicate an hour or so each day to these tasks as otherwise they can really pile up on you and suddenly you’ve got an order for 300 insoles due tomorrow with only approximately 2 packed.
5 PM:
We’ll ensure we’re ready for the next day, with any new orders written out neatly so they can packed and processed the following day. Then, it’s time to lock up and head home until we start again tomorrow.
