Spend a Week at Y.O.U Underwear

This week we’re giving you all a peek behind the scenes with a week in the life of our business. Every week at Y.O.U Underwear is different and every week is always busy!

With the post Christmas period being a quieter one in terms of sales, it's a good opportunity for us to get things done behind the scenes and prepare for the upcoming year.

Stocktake

This week that meant doing our stocktake!

Rafaelia and Sophie, our stock and inventory wizards, spent 7 days counting pants in our fulfilment centre and storage space, as well as in the shop. It’s important for us to do this annually so that we know the exact value of the stock we are holding as well as contributing to our Fairtrade certification numbers.

This also informs the next underwear order we will place with our manufacturer as we know which products we’ve sold the most of.

Spring Fair

To take a break from stocktaking, this week we visited the Spring Fair Trade Show. Sarah, Steve, Sophie, and Holly drove to Birmingham’s NEC where this enormous fair is hosted and thousands of traders are exhibiting. The purpose of our visit was to catch up with the owners of some of the brands we stock in our shop, gather ideas for new products and businesses to stock, and take inspiration from some of the beautiful displays.

Since the fair is so huge, we spent an hour or so navigating the halls and figuring out where we wanted to go. We grabbed a coffee and listened to a talk about trend forecasting put together by Faire, then headed off to the Gifts & Greetings hall. We chatted to some lovely sustainability-focused brands as well as meeting a few new B Corps. Keep your eyes peeled for some new stock coming soon to our Oxford store…

To round off the day we caught up with some of our favourite brands like The Makerss, who produce beautiful craft kits, Trashy Bags, with their amazing upcycled products, and Bare Kind, with their wonderful array of bamboo animal socks.

After a mad dash to squeeze everyone in, we headed home full of ideas.

Recycling

The counting didn’t stop with stocktake! Since we had reached the end of January, it was time to count up and weigh all of the recycling donations we had received. We receive parcels of underwear to be recycled every day and this month was a big one! 

Sarah, Sophie, and Rafaelia sorted through all of the bags and put aside any new, unopened underwear or lightly worn bras to donate to Smalls For All before sorting through cotton and synthetic donations to be weighed. 

This month was a whopping 40.8kg of underwear for recycling, 144 bras, and 5 pairs of pants to Smalls For All! We are so grateful that all of this will be saved from going to landfill. And it is always a treat to receive the lovely notes you send with your parcels - so thank you!

Shop

Meanwhile, over in our Oxford Covered Market shop, we received some lovely new products from Namaste, who make beautiful items out of recycled sari fabric. Our shelves are getting fairly full these days but we managed to squeeze in some space for a new display.

After chatting to the lovely people at Hayashi at the trade fair and admiring their information display bags, they very kindly sent two over so we set about adding these into our display as well.

Website Work

Towards the end of the week we spent some time working to improve our website. We are currently updating some of our product descriptions to make the information easier to read, as well as updating some of the imagery.

Sophie has been going through our product listings to make a note of which images will be a priority for our next photoshoot. We are currently pulling together plans for the next shoot so if you have been considering modelling for us - now is your chance!

All of our models are volunteers with friends and family often involved. We work hard to ensure the environment makes our models feel as comfortable and listened to as possible. Everyone starts the day a little nervous but our feedback about the shoot has always been overwhelmingly positive. So if this is something you'd like to be involved in - or have more questions about - please get in touch: help@youunderwear.com

So as you can see, it's been another busy and productive week at Y.O.U!

We hope you enjoyed seeing a bit of what goes on behind the scenes. Every week brings something new so we will certainly be sharing again soon and do let us know if there is anything you would particularly like to see from behind the scenes.

For more Behind the Scenes info...

Read about the 3 year journey of our Oxford shop

Spend the day with us on a photoshoot

Find out more about Bare Kind's business journey

 

All images courtesy of Y.O.U Underwear