Hello everyone from the Norfolk Warehouse! Another week goes by and the realisation of us being a warehouse is in full flow.
On Monday, we were amazed by the amount of online orders we had – at this time of the year and especially considering the weather currently – We don’t expect loads of orders but it really shocked us. We didn’t panic and just like a well oiled machine we got the job done. Afterwards I contacted all of our cigar suppliers to see if there were any stock issues, of which I am pleased to say there aren’t many and then I sent a stock report on our out of stock Cuban cigars to our Head of Operations to see what she could do. In the afternoon, I ordered some Cuban stock (in the hope we get it all). It does seem like the popular cigars are easy to get but not the more obscure lines like Sancho Panza and Saint Luis Rey.
On Tuesday, I focused on the C.Gars cigar library. I now have the help of one of our marketing specialists Lewis (you may have seen him on our Youtube channel). Together we have been given a large list of articles that need writing and uploading. This week four articles were uploaded! A highlight for me was the Top 10 cigars of 2025 – It is fascinating to see what our most popular cigars are chosen by you! You can read it here, but make sure you check out all of our articles. As well as creating articles, I improved some old ones so they will get more views from people using Google. In between articles, I had a look at some of our oldest out of stock products to see if there was any I could put online. I then contacted our suppliers to see if they have stock of which I found some we will never get again, so I then have to take them off the website.
On Wednesday, I focused on the shop newsletters. Even though I no longer run a shop anymore, my knowledge on the products certainly helped me create the newsletters with the shops. Like I have always said, you need to travel to each of the shops to truly appreciate the uniqueness of each store. C.Gars Leeds have started doing Whisky Flight Nights on Fridays (when they don’t have a cigar sampling event). I think it’s a great idea for £15. Afterwards, Lisa and I started our weekly stock count. We decided to start with Cuban cigars to get them fully completed in a day and then move onto New World cigars. Late on in the day I was tasked to check a price difference between two suppliers. It looks like we can now get PDR cigars from two different suppliers and so I was tasked to see the price difference so we can pass those changes onto our customers. So if you see some PDR cigars go down in price, you are welcome.
Thursday was stock count day. We were given a new stock sheet to use as a lot of our cigars have had slight name changes, but this was good as the new sheet only had everything that was online at the time, and so anything we found that wasn’t on the stock sheet I put online, it felt like a fantastic day. Afterwards, I was given another task from Chris our assistant manager and my Yoda – He wanted me to find out the sales of certain cigars for January and compare them to February, all the ones he had chosen were on sale in January and not on sale in February and he wanted to see the difference in sales and see if its a popularity issue with the cigar or a price issue. Again I found it very fascinating to see and completed it as soon as possible.
Friday was upon us. We started our day by picking orders and then we started moving stock around the warehouse. We are now moving all pipe tobacco into one room with Ben, so he can manage our stock levels a lot easier. It certainly is an interesting office for him but he will soon get used to it and the best part? His office is next to mine! By the way, I still haven’t moved from where I used to sit in the shop. I have now just claimed it as my office! Afterwards I started to organise our New World humidor, just like I did with the Cuban cigars a couple of weeks ago, all New world cigars will be placed alphabetically. It helps a lot during stock count and if we have any new starters it will help them when picking orders. We have already organised our Davidoff/Plasencia section so it goes alphabetically perfectly – the rest of the brands will just be a bigger task – But as always we will get there!
I hope you have enjoyed this week’s going on.
So long for now.
Oliver.