CHANGE (WILL DO YOU GOOD)!

Not only did we start our fall hours this week, (in case you missed it we’re now open on WEDNESDAYS!! As in TODAY!!  Whoop whoop!)

But we’ve also been making other changes around here.

Completing the space expansion gave us an opportunity to bring on more local makers, tons of new inventory and some sweet new employees.  It became clear as I started training everyone on how inventory flows in and out of Plume that I had WAY too much information stored in my head and not nearly enough procedures in place to help everyone keep things moving smoothly. While we have a POS (point-of-sale) system, we were still searching for inventory items manually within the system at the time of checkout. This wasn’t due to functionality, but rather I’ve been stubbornly resisting the addition of a scanner for the last few years.

If you recall, it took me 2 1/2 years to migrate from my manual “garage sale” type checkout process to an actual Point-of-Sale system. So remember who you’re dealing with. To me, part of the Plume experience is a little bit of stepping back in time and having more customer interaction and not a big-box approach where people just come in and out quickly. I also personally do not care to hear constant beeping noises at the checkout counter. However, when a new employee starts, the learning curve to train them on how to search for 70 different makers in the system and hundreds (if not thousands) of inventory items has become almost impossible. There’s a lot of room for error. Sooo…I finally bit the bullet and added a scanner to our checkout counter.

I’m getting to be very good friends with our new barcode label printer. All new inventory that comes into the shop is being barcoded and we’re about 80% done with pulling all the existing inventory off the sales floor and adding barcode stickers. Not a simple task. I can say now that the difference in our checkout times is such an improvement and I hope you can feel that on your end, dear customers! Not that we want to rush you out the door, but the holidays are coming and we don’t want you getting frustrated while we hunt and peck at the computer to ring you up. It’s also freed up the new girls to feel comfortable spending more time getting to know you while they’re ringing up your goodies instead of getting stressed if they can’t find something in the computer.

So all in all, another area of growth and I find myself saying “Why didn’t I do this a long time ago?”

By the way, November 1st is our 5-year anniversary! I can’t believe it! If you know anything about small business you know the statistics and the amount of small businesses that fail within the first 5-years. So this date is a huge MILESTONE and will definitely be celebrated…but I’m not sure what that looks like just yet.

Whether you’ve been hanging out here for the last five years or are a newbie, thanks so much for being a part of Plume.

Stay tuned, friends!