Victoria is halfway through its mandated retail shutdown. Here, Munro Footwear Group chief experience officer Lee Munro discusses how the business responded to the announcement.
How did Munro Footwear Group respond to the mandated retail shut down in Victoria?
For us first and foremost we were looking at safety and making sure our team was safe.
So when it came to these latest restrictions – the hard lockdown – we'd already closed most of the Melbourne stores as the cases escalated and as Stage 3 was reintroduced.
At that stage, that's when we decided that we didn't think it was in the best interest of our teams being open.
You never plan for this. You never want to do it. It's not great for the team, it's not great for the customers and we thought we did a really good job with PPE for the team.
We took it really seriously and were training and planning around trying to operate the stores safely.
We've also got a product that is very tactile.
People like to touch and feel it, so it's not necessarily an easy product to manage in a pandemic but it is what it is, as a business you have to roll with the punches and just try to make the most of the opportunities or challenges that you get.
What was involved in sourcing PPE for the team?
In one side of the business a lot of our suppliers had been through it all – having supply lines out of China – and they were giving us insights and really pushing us into masks a long time ahead of our government.
I think our suppliers in general have been wonderful.
We've had a lot of support from suppliers in terms of deferring product or payment terms or shifting production later, even cancelling some orders, so we've built our supply aside relationships over many years and that's really held us in good stead.
I think that the other thing that the suppliers have done is give us a global view.
We have supply in most continents of the world, so being able to talk to those people and learn what's happening in different markets has definitely completed our picture and expanded our understanding.
So we thought we had reasonable understanding and reasonable measures in place.
It was essentially a really big team effort; retail operations, our people and culture team and our product sourcing team have been doing things like sourcing masks.
It really was logistically a challenge and something different but we had the whole business really pull together behind trying to be as safe as possible but also trying to maximise what business we can do at this time.
Were there any challenges involved in sourcing the PPE?
There's been many challenges.
I think communicating and coordinating a team – we've been out of the office now for a fairly long time, we've had people working from home since March – so we haven't had much of an opportunity to get together as a team at all for nearly for four months.
So that's definitely a challenge, but modern technology is pretty fantastic!
We still get to have business updates that are companywide, we still run – it's not business as usual – but we still run most of the team meetings that we would have otherwise run.
However, there's definitely challenges in securing something like a mask because we don't have the experience in it, we don't know the suppliers, we don't know whether they will be up to the medical standard that you need so there were all those things that we had to learn quickly.
But, we've got a pretty great team so they can think on their feet and react and make do with the circumstances.