Yes okay it’s about 1000% smaller – but still, it’s not the size that counts. Our distribution manager Sid has done a fantastic job of getting us ready for handling orders, he used to work at GAME with me and is used to processing quite a few orders every day!

Basically this is below the office and behind the shop so we can pick their stock too. Steve who has joined us from Bertrams THE is now looking at stock holding profile for us to hold. We pick from here first and then cascade to the usual suspects. Which looking at other setups is actually quite sophisticated and allows us to manage margin and availability pretty well.

The first picture below shows the two offices that were there before – then them being knocked down, cleared out, lovely racking and the flat screen PCs and packing benches. All very state of the art.

In the last few weeks our surrounding space has evolved quite rapidly – and as my short term memory isn’t great I thought it might be good to get some of it recorded here.

When I first arrived on September 10th there was pretty much nothing here at all. The building was, at some point before being a carpet shop some sort of weird supermarket with small units upstairs – not sure how you’d get to them though as there is just a small set of stairs at the back. As a consequence there has been quite a bit of knocking down walls and rebuilding to get it into a decent shape to work in. I still have the occasional pang of desire for daylight but that passes.

Where the Retail8 team works started out like this:

(you’ll be pleased to see the books made it in from day one!)

Then lots of furniture was ordered and we spent hours and hours recruiting exceptional staff to sit at these new tables.

Finance sit a room away – although all my ‘office stuff’ I move around with can be seen in the next photo. What an exciting update this is proving to be.

One more photo of things being unpacked and I’ll post some smaller ones of the office and mini distribution hub tomorrow.

The picture with the part assembled furniture also gives a glimpse of one of our glass walled meeting rooms, 221b, (problem solving room).