Wellworths Blog

Monday 9^th February 2009, was the first day back in store, having got there nice and early, I had the builders there waiting for me, they were giving the front of the store a proper face lift. It was very dirty, had plants growing out of the walls and needed a bit of attention. I remember, at this time only having a key for the back of the store, as the full set of keys hadn’t been given back to us yet. This meant for some fun, as I then had to run through the store to get to the front to turn the alarm off!

It was quite an emotional feeling going back into the store, it didn’t quite feel real. We had closed only a month earlier and here we were about to embark on a re-opening. I remember walking around the very empty and hollow sounding store, wondering what this was all going to look like once we had set it back up. I actually felt really excited about this!

I walked around the whole of the store, checking it all over. The store may have only been empty for a month, but we had had some very bad weather in that time and there were a few puddles around the place, but nothing that couldn’t be easily sorted and the builders were already starting on this.

During the first week, the priority was to work out how we wanted the store to be set up. We knew that we wanted a very different feel from the way it had been as Woolworths, we had always thought it felt claustrophobic, so we wanted to give it more of an open and airy feel.

It was also the week to plan what we needed to achieve to open the store on time, we had already gone along way to getting the stock at the Spring fair, but what else did we need? The first thing was a computer and Epos system. One of the Landlords colleagues strength was in systems, so he came over to help us with this side of things and started contacting companies to see what we would need. It was also just getting all the basics in the store, we had no phone line, internet and we needed to get all the utilities organised. It was like moving into a new house.

In this first week there was obviously a lot of interest in what was going on in the store, but we were not ready to tell the outside world what was happening…………… yet. 

Why the name Wellworths you may ask, well the owner is Irish and Wellworths had been a trading name over there, we had spent over a week brainstorming in the early days for a name and failed to find anything that felt right, one day the landlord mentioned the name Wellworths as an idea. I must admit at first I wasn’t sure, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it and wanted to go with it. We gave the name to a company to do our branding and what we got back was just perfect.

So that is where it all started!! I hope you have enjoyed the beginning of the Wellworths story and the next blogs will be about the set up before we opened.

Next time “5 weeks to set up”

I promised them all on that day that….

…I would keep in contact and help them in everyway possible to get a new job. So once a week I would ring each of them and make sure we were all ok. These could be quite emotional calls as I still felt like we were a family.        

In the meantime I was still in regular contact with the landlord and it was finally in the 3^rd week of January that I finally got the call i’d been waiting for, that we had the go ahead to set up the store. I immediately rang all the staff and spoke to them about the plans, a few had already got new jobs, but out of the 25 staff that left 21 including myself were coming back! That was a great moment, beng able to tell them that we were going to have our store back.

We immediately went out to find a buyer, the one job that we needed to cover that we didn’t have in store already. I had lots of applications, but most didn’t have the experience and we needed someone who could start straight away and know what to look for and where to look. I had already found out about the Spring Fair, retail trade fair at the NEC in Birmingham which was at the beginning of February, so we needed someone for then.

We hired Daniel Roy and went off to Birmingham, what an experience going for the first time, it was like being a kid in a sweet shop. There were 20 halls filled with stands of everything you could ever think of and I didn’t know where to start! We worked our way around and with a plan of what we wanted to find, were very successful in finding what we needed. This was the week before we got our first access back into the store on Monday 9^th February…