Kurt

Profit Protection Investigator

“Everyone is so passionate about the brand.”

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

  A good day for me is knowing that my customers (i.e. my colleagues) are confident to pick up a phone or drop me an email to ask questions, rather than struggling to get by just because they are too scared to ask for help. Knowing that we are approachable makes my day, a good day.

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

  External factors have the biggest impact on a challenging day. For instance, when our retail stores get hit with high volume thefts, helping our store colleagues learn from what happened and stay motivated is my priority. The nature of our role means that colleagues can sometimes be a little worried or defensive when I turn up or make contact with them. My challenge is to make them feel at ease so that we can learn from the lessons and prevent further losses as a team.

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

  My typical week is to assist my retail colleagues with reducing loss to the business through communicating, coaching and coordinating. I contribute to the weekly calls with district managers to identify stores that may need further assistance due to trends and patterns from the previous week, or from intelligence gathered from other agencies and forums. I work in a preventative manner, where I plan and commit my time to stores to carry out internal audits to identify weaknesses that could contribute to losses. I look for ways to introduce best practice and industry standards to protect both our people, stock and premises. I work reactively to intelligence gathered, where collusion may take place internally within the business, and conduct investigations to bring those who wish to exploit the business to account. I plan time to train and educate teams on ways to reduce losses and to keep themselves safe in difficult situations.

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

  The best thing about working with AllSaints is the really cool people I get to speak to everyday. Everyone is so passionate about the brand. They really all want to do well and offer a real experience to our customers. The culture at AllSaints shines through both in our East London Studios and stores, and also in the relaxed and amazing clothes that we wear. People in my field usually wear suits, so it is a real difference and something that I had to get used to when I first started with AllSaints. With my uniform allowance, that we get every six months, my wardrobe is just bursting with really cool clothes (my wife is not happy that I now take up more space than her).

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

  Simply how everyone really does get along with each other, although things might not always link up as we would like, the one thing that remains is that everyone wants others to do well and be successful. We are #OneTeam.

• Why AllSaints?

  Why not? It’s a very cool brand! (And they were the ones recruiting at the time, now they are stuck with me - haha!) The culture is awesome - diverse and aiming high. Come and join the ride!
   

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

  Don’t expect things to look like other companies, we do things differently, we are fast-paced and you can make a difference if you want to.

• Tell us about your journey with AllSaints so far.

  It’s been a very different experience so far. I started in 2019 where my very first month consisted of tender negotiations for security, CCTV, alarm and maintenance and insurance providers, all areas that had not been negotiated for several years. This was followed by the arrival of my son and then shortly after I attended my first jury summons. The profit protection team changed its whole management team from finance to brand operations, and then Covid soon hit the world so it’s been a whirlwind ride!

  Covid started a whole new chapter in how to learn, how to close stores quickly, safely and then to monitor and reopen at any given notice. Even though all this happened within a short period of time, it proved that we are all #OneTeam and that we are adaptable.