Always learning, always improving

“It’s a poor day if you don’t learn anything” that’s a saying that I’ve become accustomed to, being from a training and development background and it is a statement that I fully endorse and believe in!  Whether it’s learning a totally new skill, or just a fact or information you didn’t know, it keeps our brains ticking over, even when you are (dare I say it) ‘older’ like me!  There is a satisfaction in picking up a new skill, or mastering something, with someone’s help, that you couldn’t previously work out or do.

It is equally rewarding for the person giving the training, whether it’s coaching, mentoring, standing at the front and delivering information or training – watching the lightbulb moments happen in front of your eyes and knowing that you’ve helped someone along their way is a great feeling.

Here at The Bridal Collection Lancaster, training is such a big part of our everyday life, within our team we ‘help each other out’ every day, imparting our information and knowledge and most of all, experience.  Our new stylists are trained and nurtured along as they move through their journey of becoming first class bridal stylists.  It is so important to us that they have reached a certain point in their training before we even let them loose, so to speak, on a ‘real’ bride.  The reason being, they will, during their career with us, help so many brides find ‘the one’ but for each individual bride, that may be their only bridal appointment and we want to make sure they get the very best advice and experience out of their time with us.

Our ongoing training for the whole team includes our in-house training where we literally rip apart everything we do and look for ways we may want to improve, or just change things up a bit and offer something different.  One of the most important things you can do is to continuously review what you do and what you offer to check, ‘does it still serve the purpose and have the outcome we intended it to?’  In other words, is it still working?

I am a great lover of change….change is good, it keeps me focussed, it means I’m not being complacent, it also keeps me ‘grounded’ – I always strive to be the best at what I do and I have surrounded myself with a like minded team who have the same goal – so for example, when we won The Wedding Industry Award for Best Bridal Retailer in the North West the last two years, we celebrated a little (lot!!) but then we said, ‘what can we do better, how can we maintain that level?’

We are very privileged to have the best designers in our boutique and they also want us to have a fantastic knowledge of their fabulous dresses as well as the knowledge of how to market them to our brides.  Our designers offer us all sorts of training in product knowledge; modern marketing and general team dynamics training and we take them up on that offer as often as we can.  This week we had Jo Stott from Maggie Sottero in our boutique for a full day team stylist event.  This had been booked in the diary for many months and then with the ‘lockdown’ news we really thought, ‘should we cancel, do we need the time to do other things?’ but we decided to go ahead with it – it was the right decision!  At a time when the team was about to part company for four weeks and we all couldn’t help but feel a bit low with the impending lockdown closure ,it gave us a great motivational boost and reminded us why we do what we do and of how passionate we all are about our boutique and our roles within it.

So we can guarantee that when we re-open, our hearts and minds will be fully engaged and raring to go and we look forward to getting back to doing, with great skill, experience and motivation what we do best!

Take care

Debbie x