Name: How to Reopen: Keeping safety a priority during retail therapy
Uploaded: 2020-06-25
Duration: 5 min 30 s
Description: Sid Keswani, President of Pandora Jewelry, explains.

[INTRO MUSIC] SID KESWANI: Our primary focus is on team member and consumer safety. So with that in mind, we have opened our stores ensuring that we are following the local social distancing laws, as well as ensuring that our team members feel safe, and so they make our consumers feel safe when they come into the store. Some of the tools that we're using to help our team members are things such as curbside pickup, which we are live with, as well as we're using a Waitlist Me app, which allows team members to limit the number of people that come into a store, and if it exceeds a certain amount, then we put them on a list. So they can walk around the mall and come back in their leisure, when their time is right. So it's really helped our team members feel safe and our consumers feel safe, as well. And then lastly, we walk down the path of things such as contactless checkout, as well as Apple Pay, et cetera. In general we've created some safety protocols for all our stores, and they apply across the board, whether they're in-mall or in outlet, outdoor centers. And so we've followed local laws wherever necessary, but we have put into place some minimum requirements from Pandora, one of them being that we require all employees to wear a mask, as well as making sure we have safety and sanitizing stations in all our stores. So that's really been one thing that we have enforced across the board. We've created some additional training for our employees to ensure that they know how to interact with our customer base. And we are also doing some additional things around cleaning in our stores. We've of course put things such as the six-foot markers in our stores. And our team members now clean every piece of jewelry. So for example, if you come in and you want to buy a piece of jewelry, we'll let you try it on, we'll put it back on the tray, we have some cleaning machines in stores, we'll clean it before we put it back in our showcase. And of course, we've removed all jewelry where a customer could touch and feel the jewelry. So it's all behind a showcase for safety right now. We do see a little bit more business or more people in our outdoor centers, so we've had to be a little bit more cautious there. But in general, we've been able to manage pretty well, given the circumstances. We are very fortunate at Pandora, we did not furlough any of our employees. Our employees all stayed on our payroll for the first eight weeks, and even since then, most of our employees have been able to stay employed. And so we took the time to really train and engage our employees at that time. And that's paying dividends. So as we opened stores, we were able to bring our employees back to work very quickly. And they were trained in the new reality of how do you deal with selling jewelry in a socially distant climate. Even in this time of adversity, our team members have really responded. And the touch of kindness that they've provided to each other has been quite amazing. And our leaders have really stepped up. I believe in this time of uncertainty, communication is critical, and we believe we've done a good job of that. And our team members tell us that, because we talk to them frequently, and we listen to them. We're getting feedback from our local markets on a weekly basis, and that's really been helpful. As we move forward, there will be learnings from this that we will apply in the years to come. We are a partner with UNICEF, and we made a huge donation, and we're actually a sponsor for their COVID fund for children. So that's really great. And then, of course, locally in the US, we've really looked at the philanthropic efforts that we could be part of. And the one that really comes to life for us is the American Nurses Association. So we have Nurses Charm, and we donated our sales from Nurses Week-- 100% of our sales to the American Nurses Association, which was almost $100,000, just because we feel like our front line workers have been amazing. And personally, my wife is a nurse, so it was even more emotional for me to be able to do that. Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of things that we're going to have to see as things evolve. But I think in the near future, we see two or three key things that are changing in the marketplace. One is, Omni channel was already something that was becoming more and more important, but now I believe that's accelerated, and it's going to be a big part of everybody's journey. And at Pandora, we're onboard with that and we're down that pathway already. So we've jumped on it and kept going. We believe that artificial intelligence, AI, is going to be another technology piece that's going to become very relevant for us, and so we're looking and exploring those ideas as well. And then lastly, I think the consumer is going to really look for more than just good customer experience. They're going to look for a safe and good customer experience. And I believe retailers that can provide that and put on their A-game are going to really win in this environment. And at Pandora, we are striving to have a great consumer experience that is safe. And I look forward to being able to share some of those experiences in the near future. 

Sid Keswani, President of Pandora Jewelry, explains.

How to Reopen: Keeping safety a priority during retail therapy 

Retail

How to Reopen: Pandora Jewelry 

Sid Keswani, President of Pandora Jewelry,  explains. 