In the spirit of Christmas we have another diary entry from Tim Cecil Sr - great-grandson of our founder Henry Buck, who has been a pre-eminent part of the Australian menswear scene for over forty years. He has been a menswear buyer for all of those years and has attended over 80 trips to the most influential menswear tradeshow Pitti Uomo in Firenze – Italy. So in his tenure as style aficionado, Tim has seen it all, and met them all before they made it. Prior to taking the helm at Bucks he was responsible for the custom shirt department at Turnbull & Asser which is a story in itself. He is a fount of knowledge and insight on the topic, and is more intuitive than anyone I have ever met in terms of the ever-evolving world of menswear. This is the first of three installment of his memoirs. Take a look at the second and third of Tims recollection. Bringing Mail Order to Chaos The early days of Henry Bucks mail order were chaotic, funny, stressful and fraught with deadlines and challenges for the mail order team at 320 Collins Street. We commandeered the basement of the CML as it was, where they had their mail department and other unused space and set up the mail order. No computers, nothing online, just hand written orders from customers and telephone. The stock was pinched, sometimes reluctantly by the ‘mail order shoppers’ who raided the warehouse along the corridor taking valuable gifts wanted by the stores and putting them into the WOGS (waiting on goods) snake of parcels that wound its way down the corridor behind the basement shop. There was another snake of parcels waiting to be paid for or other suchlike obstacles to finalisation acronymed WOPS (waiting on payment) and WOWS (waiting on wrapping in gift paper and ribbon and then HB despatch paper) and finally WODS (waiting on despatch) waiting for the van to pick them up. The early days of modern mail order when we finally computerised the systems about 25 years ago was managed by my wife Rachel, indeed the pied piper of young casuals and Craig Cochrane, now our store manager. Rachel remembers a dream (we all had dreams and nightmares) where she was in Mosman, on what is now the Alan Border oval with about 50 children who ran away from her up towards what is now, and then perhaps, the Mosman Art Gallery which in Rachel’s dream was a chaotic freeway. She panicked and couldn’t call them back and they kept on running. They were the WOGS and WOPS and WOWS. Read into the dream what you will. We had maybe four people receiving and processing orders, five or six gift wrappers and three or four others running around like headless chooks. Every call led to an animated conversation about who the gifts were for and why and sometimes ‘what do you think?’ conversations that led to shopping for the whole family plus the dog, where the parcel should be left, what greetings card to enclose, which gifts was for whom etc. Our fabulous Brenda took over from Rachel and knew every caller as did many of her helpers, many of whom are now lawyers, doctors, financiers and politicians – Christmas casual work at Henry Bucks was a rite of passage. This somewhat eccentric and eclectic body of talented and self motivated amateurs put Henry Bucks mail order on the map and built what is now a far more sophisticated and smart computer managed, systems-driven service managed by Peruvian born Alfredo, a charming fellow with a bachelor of business degree to add to his technical degree in animal science – quite useful when dealing with some difficult callers. Effectively, Henry Bucks were pioneers in catalogue selling. We were sending out catalogue, famous for their wit and whimsy, 100 year ago with cartoons later, in the 30’s brilliantly sketched by the famous Alan McCulloch. And so the tradition carried forward to this day with much of the creativity behind the catalogues being prepared in house. henrybucks.au/store/christmas
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 23:16:44 +0000
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