Three years ago, in the throes of a worldwide pandemic, we launched a partnership that would take us past the woes of a country in complete lockdown into a learning experience about e-commerce.

Switch has a particular name for situations like the birth of Lucy’s online store.  

We call it being *RIKMAed.* This situation comes about when Rik drops a particularly impossible task in your lap with a seemingly insane deadline and tells you “we’ll do it ta, I have a plan!” 

And when he says we, he means we. 

With Lucy, we had 3 weeks to build and design the online store, organise a category system that made sense, load all the products (about 1000 to start with) with the correct tags and images, set up ads and accounts and design a launch campaign. 

After the Launch

The numbers show us that the Lucy online store was a success.

But to us the success of this partnership isn’t in the growth or sales or profit, it’s in the lessons we learned and will keep learning.

When we started working on the Lucy online store, stores were shut nationwide, and all shopping was funnelled into online channels. As a result, the Lucy online store was an instant success. 

But the lockdown wouldn’t last forever. And we knew we needed to keep that same momentum going once the physical stores opened back up and life went back to semi-normal. 

The Lucy team helped a lot with how we went about pushing the online store as yet another avenue for their sales. 

Working With your Client

One of the great things about the Lucy team is that the online store is seen as yet another store: it isn’t in competition with the brick-and-mortar outlets, but an opportunity to reach new customers and build new audiences. This means that we could look at all the sales channels as supporting each other, running promotions across all outlets, selling online tickets to live events and providing online support in-store. It all works seamlessly. 

From the start, the entire Lucy team recognised the value in changing people’s behaviour and buying patterns. 

Maltese people were not used to buying online. For the first year and a half in the life of the online store, we almost always had a special offer, discount or competition going. This kept people going back to the store to see what was coming next and it slowly changed buying patterns, even if the change was just slight enough to allow for more revenue in the online store.

Today, many people do their research online and then go in-store to purchase, or vice versa: the Lucy experience works seamlessly. Whether you’re shopping online or in-store, the Lucy experience is the same throughout, which has helped significantly and allowed us to pull back a little on offers and discounts to work on other ways of providing value to Lucy clients. 

So far,  we’ve introduced a loyalty club, seasonal subscription boxes, and a Diamond Club that rewards our best customers.

Lessons Learned

Even without the special offers, the Lucy store still reports strong numbers because our digital efforts are backed by a strong brand. The Lucy team knows who Lucy is: she’s practically a real person with a big personality and a very particular voice. When Lucy talks, she talks based on a very real set of values that is echoed by everyone on the team. 

It’s one of our most important lessons tactical communication is important, but not every piece of communication from a brand needs to be about sales. Use your comms to build community, to speak about who the brand is, what it likes and what it stands for. Lucy does a great job of mixing informational, tactical, and brand comms in a way that has created a fan base that is loyal to Lucy like she is a friend and not a brand.

There’s another important lesson we learned from working on Lucy.

 Plan everything ahead so that when you need to be spontaneous you have the space and time to dedicate to a fun, last-minute idea. 

At Lucy, we have monthly planning meetings in which we communicate any offers, new brands, product launches and sales efforts. These are put into a calendar and we structure communication and events around them. Then we brainstorm fun things like offers for lipstick day or decorating for Christmas or new Merch ideas. 

We plan so we can have fun.

The post Lessons Learned From the Lucy Online Store appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Yeah.

Exactly.

More than a year later the pandemic has shaped our agency in ways we could have never imagined, and the who, how, why, and where variables of our work life have all shifted. We now have a team that works almost completely virtually and that has allowed us to offer great flexibility to our team members and to our recruitment efforts. We’ve hired designers in Bucharest (hey Sorina!), had marketeers go to Finland for a week and stay there for a year and we have an island hopping Web PM who pops back home to Corsica regularly. 

We’ve always encouraged team members to work from wherever they felt comfortable, but this is true now more than ever. Our creative team meets up at funky little cafes to drink way too much coffee and frantically type away, and our business development team has a favourite Naxxar coffee spot for our Friday meetings. 

The new flexibility is brilliant, but these changes meant we also had to change the ways we HRed our team (yes I can invent verbs, Elise, it’s totally allowed)

From onboarding to reviews, to teambuilding our HR systems had to change to accommodate the fact that half our team was now only accessible through a video camera. 

But those parts were easy, the day-to-day care and feeding of our team has moved wholly online, as we set up weekly department and town hall meetings and quarterly HR catchups. We’ve now successfully onboarded three new people by email and video call.

The hard part was replacing the more spontaneous interactions within the team. Here’s the thing, we Switchers like each other, we want to spend time together and chat about random things, we miss each other and it affects our work when we don’t get to goof off together. But spontaneity is much harder when you don’t have a coffee machine to gather around and bitch about video game upgrades (or whatever it is Luke, Ed and Elise are always talking about).

So what did we do?

Weekly Team Meet-ups

Well, our weekly office online meet-up is usually a time when we pass on information, make announcements and generally catch everyone up on the running of Switch. But occasionally we just have a week when the meeting is left open to everyone to chat about whatever random thing comes up, or just smile happily at their friends. 

Brainstorms

We’ve started twice-monthly Switch brainstorms which are focused on getting people to think creatively about a variety of topics and interact with people they don’t normally speak to in their daily work lives. And we set a rule, work stuff over Google chat, personal stuff over Whatsapp. This way our Whatsapp group can be used for fun stuff, like fermenting a revolution against the government department who stole our parking places in Mriehel, without distracting from work messages.

Spontaneous Catch-ups and Virtual Events

We have regular catch-ups in smaller groups that are just a chance to vent or chat about non-work stuff, some of these happen IRL, some of them happen virtually, on some occasions we’ve just worked on random craft projects together as we chatted over Google meet. We’ve had to find ways to move our annual Christmas and Summer get togethers online, last year we even had a virtual Secret Santa.

Keep Improving

It takes more effort when we’re not all in the same room together, we’re currently discussing implementing a virtual morning hangout session that people can pop in to and have a casual chat as they gear up for the day. We’re constantly thinking of ways to increase team interaction, both during work or after hours, or as a  hybrid of both.  We’ve asked our more tech forward team members to keep an eye out for anything new that could help us to keep improving.

Not every company needs the level of social interaction that we do, but every organisation that is moving to a more hybrid system needs to think about giving people ways to interact outside of meetings and emails. Meetings and emails get things done, but they don’t make a team and then don’t make a happy workplace. That workplace may increasingly be moving online but it still needs to nurture the people within it.

So, in conclusion, people still need to interact socially at work, and it’s our responsibility to give them ways to do that if we want to foster a happy and healthy work environment. 

The post Quantum Team Dynamics, or keeping a team together over time and space appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.