Coronavirus!

Coronavirus!

I guess we can’t really do a blog post and ignore what’s going on in the world! We’ve all been massively affected by Covid 19, but we thought we’d share what’s been going on at Mary’s during lockdown.

We shut our doors, but the work didn’t stop! We decided to use this opportunity to finally get our webshop up and running. It takes a huge amount of work, from our brilliant staff working from home, to upload every item in the shop onto the website. Each item needs a description, a photo and pricing, all done by humans, one at a time! We used our Facebook and Instagram pages to keep in touch with our amazing customers, allowing us to keep you all in stock of whatever you needed whilst we beavered away in the background building the website. It took a few weeks, but with a lot of work, we finally went live!

In the meantime, whilst most staff were working from home sorting the website, Mary and Richard were in the shop, sorting orders and doing some maintenance. Big jobs, like our floor of the upstairs warehouse being completely redone (by Richie alone!), to small jobs, like arranging stock, all got done whilst we were closed. When the website went live, we then had one more person in store with Mary and Richard to help with the postal and click and collect orders. We were very, very lucky, that although we were closed we were able to continue working and helping our customers who needed it. And even luckier to have supportive staff to help in the mammoth task!

And now. We come to the present, with the shop fully open and the website up and running! We are trying to do everything possible to keep staff and customers safe, it’s important to try and do our bit to not spread Coronavirus. To that end, we have Perspex at the counters to help protect everyone and ask all our staff and customers to use the hand-santizer provided. We ask that our customers with children keep their children near and don’t let them wander. Our staff are free to use masks and gloves if they wish, though everyone is being educated on their proper use. Some of us have family still cocooning at home, so we’re very aware of keeping everyone safe and healthy.

Out of all of this, I think we definitely learned some lessons. We learned that Ireland is a fantastic little country full of supportive people. We learned that as useful an online store is, nothing beats the little bit of human contact we get with our customers in store. We learned the value of social media in keeping in touch with everyone, and for all the bad on it, we definitely got to use the good. And finally, we already knew, but had it absolutely confirmed, that the staff and customers are the beating heart of any store and we have the best ones out there!

Keep safe out there!