Saski Collection GM Isabella Laws reflects on the early days of COVID-19 and how the business has traded through this period.
Thankfully where we are we didn’t have to close the office or the warehouse.
We’re quite a small team and we’re still a relatively new business so our office is only four people and we have quite a big space, so it is very easy for us to distance ourselves.
Obviously, if anyone has any illness or symptoms or anything we’ve asked them to work from home but we’ve been very lucky in the sense that everyone’s been really healthy since this all began.
We’ve all continued to work in the office, being extra cautious with hygiene.
We stopped the kitchen in our office and warehouse so people weren’t using the same dishes and mugs and did anything extra to make sure that we were isolating as much as we could in the office.
For the warehouse it was very much the same.
We have quite a small warehouse team but we have three warehouses where we’re based on the Gold Coast, so it was easy for us to be able to separate everybody.
And the same thing with hygiene goes in the warehouse.
We’ve got gloves in the warehouse, hand sanitiser everywhere, facemasks if anyone wants to wear them, just making sure that everyone’s taking the necessary precautions.
We have very little interaction with anyone outside of the business, besides our delivery drivers and all our packages are just left in a safe area – they come and grab them and we don’t have to see them.
So in that sense we haven’t had to make any massive changes but we’ve had a huge increase in demand on the site so we’ve had to make changes with our shipping options.
As many know, eCommerce has experienced massive delays so we did end up removing the standard shipping option from our site just to make sure that our customers were getting their orders as quickly as possible.
So we only offer express shipping and it just means that people aren’t having to wait too long.
We just did the standard things that I feel that a lot of eCommerce stores have had to do – extended times for dispatch, and extended times for returns just because we are making sure that we’re being safe.