After working as a Brand Manager for six
years in the fashion industry I was approached by Cool Time Equity to manage
five international luxury watch and pen brands for distribution into Australia
– I happily took that position six months ago and my blogging entries will
revolve around this challenging role in the Sales and Marketing industry.
Providing some background information on
who I work for; The Barbagallo Group, which consists of many small and large
businesses. The Barbagallo group is responsible for the Perth distribution of
luxury motor vehicles, yachts and finance on a very large scale. On the smaller
scale they also own Box Magazine, Pink Tank Events, ToyBox Charity, Vault and
Cool Time Equity. All staff has offices in the same building amongst each
other, everyone has a role within the company and everyone works together as a
team to tie in all the companies together. My blog entries will mostly be about
Cool Time Equity but I will also mention how my role can tie in with the other
businesses.
My role as Brand Manager for Cool Time
Equity means I am involved with marketing, sales, customer relation’s
management, customer service, buying assistant and many other day-to-day tasks
to facilitate in all aspects of this business. The brands I look after is
U-Boat, Clerc Watches, Linde Werdelin, Montegrappa Pens, Guiliano Mazzuoli and
other brands which we purchase from other distributors at a wholesale level and
stock them in our retail store called The Horologist in Perth.
Everyday I liaise directly with our
stockists, which are the stores around Australia who support and sell the
brands that Cool Time distribute into Australia. This involves assisting with
social media, taking new orders, packaging and sending new stock and other day-to-day
enquiries. I facilitate all marketing information to all the stockists to
assist the stores with sales on the brand. Other major components of my job is
customer service; In the luxury industry it is all about keeping customers
happy to maintain the loyalty they provide to the brands and a major component
of this is warranties on faulty products. This will take up 2 -3 days a week of
my time to ensure I can have an item repaired within an appropriate time frame.
When a customer pays $30,000 or above for a watch they can be very frustrated
if something goes wrong and issues arise with customer service everyday, which
is a huge challenge.
Another challenge in my position is
maintaining the stockists that we have for each brand. When a product is
purchased at a wholesale price the store expects to sell the product at the
retail price without any issues. When a store has problems with a brand and
they are not receiving a financial benefit from the product it is my job to
create a solution to fix the issue and maintain the relationship. If a
relationship is lost; a new stockist has to be found. Ethically, this is very
hard because you cannot have any stockists within 1 – 5klms of each other in
every state of Australia because it is ethically incorrect. Taking a brand off
a stockist and allowing another store to take over the brand can also create
some ethical decisions because in future it can ruin a relationship with a
stockist.
Now that I have provided an insight to my
day-to-day tasks in my role at Cool Time I look forward to writing my second
blog entry to provide many examples and a further in-site of issues that arise
in this industry and how I try to handle each situation.
