Guest Post: My Week At TruffleShuffle By Aka
Hello, my name is Akachukwu Oguine and I just finished working at TruffleShuffle for a week as work experience. I came from Lagos to Reading for holiday, but stayed in Bristol for a week to work for the best T-shirt company ever! (Not up for discussion!)
Every day I had many different tasks and jobs to do in different areas of the business that had been planned for me by the members of the TruffleShuffle team to provide me with a better understanding about how the business works in each stage of development from packaging items to pitching ideas.
In this blog post, I will be taking you through the things I did during my work experience, day by day.
Day 1: Monday
When I first arrived at TruffleShuffle, I was introduced to every available member of the TruffleShuffle family including Iain, Amy, James, Pat, Ron, Andy, Lucy, Chris, Tracey, Claire and (Lee) Mullins.
The first task I had to complete was helping Ron and Andy pick and pack orders placed over the weekend. I enjoyed this because it was one of the more hands-on jobs I did during the week. The task was to look at the invoices, read the store codes on them and match them to the codes of the ordered items in the warehouse. It was also great because I realized how swift operations in the warehouse had to be to get all first class orders made on Sunday out by 4.00pm or earlier!
On Tuesday, I went through all the social media pages related to TruffleShuffle, including the website, looking at the huge collection of clothes, toys, mugs and much more, some of which I had packaged the day before! It was cool to see the site as a customer, while also knowing what happened to create the site and deliver the products on it behind the scenes as an employee. Looking through the social media pages also showed me the different ways in which TruffleShuffle keeps in touch with their customers.
When going through the site, I was asked to come up with at least five ways the site could be improved. This was among the hardest tasks I had to perform as the website was so well-designed and monitored that it was incredibly difficult to find problems with it! Eventually, after going through the pages so many times from top to bottom, I somehow managed to find some areas of the site which could be improved like using automatic filtering and searching, instead of the user having to press a button, a bit like Google Instant!
We also got this huge order for tons of plastic boxes to store all the goodies TruffleShuffle will be ordering for Christmas, which I found out was the busiest period at TruffleShuffle. We had to lift all the boxes into the warehouse and organize them, ready for the buyers to fill up! This was great because I had spent a lot of the day cooped up in an office upstairs on the computer and I finally had another hands-on job. Great exercise by the way (Sorry for the absence of pictures of this, but in my defense I was pretty busy!)
Day 3: Wednesday
My main task today was to sit upstairs with Pat and Iain and come up with new ideas for t-shirts which could be considered a âblast from the pastâ or âretroâ. I loved the fact that I did this because it brought back a lot of nostalgic memories of shows I really liked when I was younger, or even older shoes which I recently watched that had been cancelled years ago.
The thing about the task which was a bit of a challenge was finding out how the ideas could be used in a marketable way, but eventually, after some helpful input from Pat, Iain, Claire and James, we were able to come up with some great ideas for shirts you could possibly be wearing in the future!
Coming up with logo and character shirts was the best part of the task as I found so many cool pictures and quotes from various cartoon characters (like Arnold), Live action characters (like Barney Stinson) and musicians like (Ed Sheeran). The guys all loved my ideas so you never know, they might be coming to a T-Shirt near you very soon. Oh, and remember to watch Nicktoons, buy âxâ and suit up!
Day 4: Thursday
Today, I was working with the buyers â I helped Lucy write down the prices of various items from a new brand theyâre looking to stock called Eleven Paris so we could select the best options to sell on the website. So like Big Brother, but for clothes! I really liked a lot of the designs, especially the ones which were similar to basketball jerseys that had the last two numbers of an artistâs date of birth as their player number. Looking at all the different designs, all great in their own way, was definitely the highlight of this task.
Looking at all the different designs, all great in their own way, was definitely the highlight of this task
Day 5: Friday
Today I received my final task which was to write a blog post summarizing every task I did during my work experience at TruffleShuffle. This was one of my favorite tasks as I got to recall all the great memories I had working with such a nice, creative, wonderful and dedicated group of people who I would love to work with again sometime in the future. It was also very difficult as I had to select only portions of these memories so the blog wouldnât be too wordy!
Unfortunately, my time working at TruffleShuffle is up, but for those after me looking for where to receive work experience I would strongly recommend spending a week or two at TruffleShuffle.
This is Aka saying good bye and do the truffle shuffle. Do it!
xoxo