{"id":66644,"date":"2021-07-12T09:16:05","date_gmt":"2021-07-12T08:16:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.watchpro.com\/?p=66644"},"modified":"2021-07-12T09:17:30","modified_gmt":"2021-07-12T08:17:30","slug":"the-big-interview-beaverbrooks-rolex-loupe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.watchpro.com\/the-big-interview-beaverbrooks-rolex-loupe\/","title":{"rendered":"THE BIG INTERVIEW: Beaverbrooks + Rolex = Loupe"},"content":{"rendered":"
Beaverbrooks acquired two Fraser Hart stores, both Rolex doors, in Milton Keynes and Croydon before the pandemic in 2019 and has spent almost two years developing a brand new concept for the stores, which reopen in July under the name of Loupe.<\/strong><\/p>\n Rolex, Omega, Hublot and Zenith will be anchor brands at the Milton Keynes flagship, along with fine jewellery including specially designed Loupe collections, which will all be 18ct gold, with diamonds, with prices up to five figures that will complement the Swiss watches in store.<\/p>\n Ahead of the Loupe openings, Anna Blackburn, managing director, and Mark Adlestone, chairman, of Beaverbrooks, met Rob Corder to discuss the project.<\/p>\n WatchPro: Before we get into your exciting news, could you give us an update on how Beaverbrooks has been performing over the past year. I know your financial year runs to the end of February, so it was almost entirely overshadowed by covid. How have you managed and adapted?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Anna Blackburn:<\/strong> The starting point is to note that 2019 was our centenary, so we had our most successful year in history in terms of revenue and profits. Also, culturally, it was an amazing year.<\/p>\n We came into 2020 off the back of that centenary and really excited about the year ahead and then covid hit.<\/p>\n Mark Adlestone:<\/strong> We were just about to hold our annual conference to celebrate that year, but that conference has been pushed back and back four times now. Hopefully it will happen in September, by which time we will not have been together as a company since the start of the pandemic. That will be a time for a big celebration.<\/p>\n Anna Blackburn:<\/strong> After the high of the centenary we were hit with the ultimate low at the start of the pandemic and we made the decision, slightly ahead of the government\u2019s order, to close all our stores. Myself and Simon Smith, our retail director, visited a number of stores at that time and we could just sense that people were getting concerned. We could see what was coming so we decided to move immediately to shut our doors.<\/p>\n Mark Adlestone:<\/strong> When Anna called to say we would have to close our stores, I simply could not believe it. I said the world\u2019s gone mad. But we did what we had to do, including closing down our online business at the beginning for 19 days. The narrative around that at the time was that everybody was ordered to stay at home or risk killing their grandmas. There was a lot of pressure and guilt being applied.<\/p>\n Anna Blackburn:<\/strong> What ultimately led to the decision to close both the stores and ecommerce was that our people in the warehouse told us that they felt unsafe. From the very early stages, we committed to three key objectives. First was around the safety of our people and our customers. Second was about protecting jobs and incomes as much as possible. The third was to do with protecting the wider business, making sure that everything we were doing in the short term to fight fires did not distract us from life after the pandemic where we want to come out as strong as possible.<\/p>\n That first weekend, after we shut all stores and ecommerce, it felt like a bereavement. After more than 100 years of Beaverbrooks, we had to completely stop trading.<\/p>\n Mark Adlestone:<\/strong> It was an existential moment that hit us really badly, and I have to say I was staggered at how some businesses just managed to continue trading straight through.<\/p>\n Anna Blackburn:<\/strong> We very quickly looked at what we needed to do differently to make everything safe and within 17 days we reconfigured our offices, shops and warehouses. The senior management team did all of that together to get everything prepared for when we were able to reopen ecommerce and stores.<\/p>\n Our premise, and remember this was in the very first days of the pandemic, was that we would make everything safe enough for if it were our own families working. There was no better way to do that than do the work ourselves and that gave our teams confidence.<\/p>\n By the time we reopened in April, we were so good operationally that our people wanted to come back and start giving back to the business.<\/p>\n