David

District Manager

“This is a brand with an incredible culture of inclusivity, opportunity and hard work.”

• What does a good day look like in your role?

  Spending time in our stores with customers, my team and our amazing product! We have the wonderful ability to make people smile and these are the days where I can see it in action.

• What does a challenging day look like in your role?

  Every day is challenging and that is what I love about our brand. The challenges vary in scale and whether you have to find them or whether they fall into your lap, meeting them head-on is what makes you grow as a leader.

• What do you get up to in a typical day/week?

  My role requires a lot of organisation and I find the more organised I am the more time I get to do what I love, which is getting into stores and supporting our teams in wowing our customers. I'll spend almost one day per week reviewing my business, organising my calendar and my priorities so that my time in store has the biggest possible impact on that team and that business.

• What’s the best thing about working for AllSaints?

  The people! We have incredible customers and incredible teams.

• What’s the most surprising or unexpected thing about working for us?

  The most surprising thing is that we no longer are faced with the unexpected (with the exception of the Covid pandemic of course). Our leadership team are completely transparent with the business and this keeps us all joined up as one team, knowing our goals, able to plan ahead and working together, across department, channel and region to succeed.

• Why AllSaints?

  Everyone will have their own reason but for me it's because I've been challenged every day since joining back in 2009. Of course every person wants to challenge themselves every day, it's how we learn and grow, but no other brand has provided me with an environment where the challenges are at every turn as well as the resources to overcome them. I enjoy finishing each day knowing what I've achieved and in turn seeing my team do the same.

• What’s not in the job description but something you’d tell a friend if they were looking to join the brand?

  Be prepared to go all in! This is a brand with an incredible culture of inclusivity, opportunity and hard work, it's impossible not to get sucked into it and love it!

• Tell us about your journey with AllSaints so far.

  I joined AllSaints as an assistant manager at our Market Place store in London's West End. It was December 2009 during the peak Christmas trading weeks and the perfect way to get stuck in, supporting my store manager during our busiest weeks of the year. After nine months I moved to Westbourne Grove, a store that had opened less than a year before, also as the assistant manager and held that store over Christmas in the absence of a store manager. In early 2011, I became the store manager of Market Place, my first appointment as store manager which was a fantastic journey and one where I truly learned the importance of building the right culture in a team and developing talent. After two years I was offered the assistant manager position in our global flagship store on Regent Street. This was a brilliant role, moving from a store manager in a medium turnover store to assistant manager at our biggest turnover store, globally. I was able to implement things I had learned as a store manager whilst learning to maximise the resources that come with the global flagship. We succeeded in delivering the highest turnover year that the store had seen so far and after 18 months I was promoted to store manager in Westfield Stratford City, a top five turnover store in the UK.

  2015 was a huge sales year for the brand and I used the experience I had gained in Market Place and Regent Street to deliver the best turnover year Stratford has ever seen. In May 2016 I joined the field team as an area manager, working with stores across the South of England and Wales before becoming a district manager in May 2018. Being part of the field team came with so many challenges, having spent years leading in stores it was hard to step away and not have full control over each store within my district. The great thing about our brand is that we have talented leaders always wanting to push themselves and develop, this allowed me to feel comfortable stepping away from the day-to-day of each store, knowing I have leaders that care just as much as I do about our customers, our teams and our business.

  Nearly 12 years on and I am still finding the daily challenges, still loving the buzz I get when I walk into one of our stores, and more excited than ever about the future of the brand and my part in it. We are always learning, we are always evolving #weareallsaints.