Confined but full of ideas

It's rare that a Monday morning isn't synonymous with reunions around the coffee machine, debriefed weekends, morning giggles at Les Petites Jupes de Prune.

However, this Monday, March 16, it is in a very small committee that we find ourselves and we have the impression of being in a bad remake of Black Mirror. However, the situation is very real and we only have a few hours to address the big questions: where to confine ourselves? How to continue to work, communicate?

We could joke about the fact that our new local is fortunately bigger than the previous one (14 m2 of office part 😅) so that this crisis meeting can be held in the rules of "barrier gestures"!

We are looking forward (always from a distance) to the launch of the new collection, we rush to send the first orders which boost our morale and we say goodbye with some uncertainty and tremolos in our voices..

Tuesday morning, it's with slightly crumpled heads but all the best will in the world that we meet for our very first Videoconference on the latest app unearthed by Prune: @Whereby. And let's go for the implementation of a concrete attack plan for this first week of confinement. The main lines speak for themselves: Reassure our dear customers (and us by the way), ensure the latest shipments, discuss, advise, keep in touch, call all our service providers who have been our second family since 2012.

Day n°1: When we hadn't understood that we still had to dress for telework

The meager part that must be managed directly on site is provided by Clémentine (#lebrasdelatelier is her new nickname 💪) who sees in her apartment located 500m from the workshop an opportunity other than to finally arrive on time in the morning. Orders can be shipped for those who wish, twice a week, safely (and solitude too but we all encourage it through our screens)..!

Even June is supportive 💕

Very quickly, a question arises: what to replace our main activity? How to restructure these days which were devoted to antiquing fabric, cutting, brainstorming on our desires and materializing them... We then realize that in this life of a small business, which very often goes by at a hundred miles an hour, many ideas fall by the wayside, and by dint of saying to ourselves "come on next season we're getting started"... Well it's now! We're taking advantage of this extraordinary period to "reinvent" ourselves and develop all these little ideas that have been sitting on the corners of our offices for months...

Chase creativity, it comes back at a gallop! Prune draws from the first meeting her desire to launch a pajama-pants-sortable, even if it means staying confined at home as well as doing it with style and it is Cynthia our patronage mastermind who proposes to tackle the prototype..

The idea of ​​offering a piece so comfy as we like them, a somewhat homewear version of the culottes! We decide to take up the challenge, we will create, even confined!

 So a pajama on the way, finally this comfy-pant in which to chill for the next confined weeks.. But also the opportunity to look at our website and finally think about its future version that we have been dreaming of for a long time! Or spend more time with you on the networks, write (we dare not tell you the date of the last blog post of more than 10 lines... 🙈).

 And the whole team goes there with their little idea, their desire that they never have time to do in the days that go at 100 an hour:

• “I really want to look at google analytics and see what we could improve” @Laurie
• “Wouldn't this be an opportunity to put a chat online to chat? The company won't hurt me 😅” @cynthia
• “I can give you a benchmark of the communication of different brands to see how each one approaches the crisis” @Félicité
• “And wouldn't this be an opportunity to create lots of Pinterest boards like we always wanted to have…?”
• “A homemade shoot to put new products online in real life, isn't it? 🤷🏻‍♀️”
• "What if we had a new team/our story page?" @Clementine

At the end of the day we take the opportunity to put Cynthia's competitiveness to the test around a Petit Bac... And her bad faith at the same time, no, Geordanie does NOT exist.

However, Prune still dodges her accounting… But takes the opportunity to embark on a project that has been vampirising her office for months, the code name of which is “Impact”. Do you see what's behind it? In any case, we will soon take the floor and the pen to tell you about it if things continue to move forward at this rate...

So here we are, finally, here we are, two weeks later and still on deck, obviously like for all of you it's not easy-peasy every day... But our mornings start with a big smile (and at least as big a coffee), at 10:30 a.m. (we're chilling a little anyway), in front of our -more or less HD- webcam and sharing our tasks for the day..

To replace our daily office chatter, we created a shared document and filled it with advice, recipes, playlists, online sports sessions, series to discover.. So here's a little summary for those who are interested 💕 And don't hesitate to complete it in the comments ↓!

+1 for Love is Blind that the team unanimously recommends, it's finally people who have decided to confine themselves to date.. What are the people asking?

Good sports plans:

And because we really like to play too much...

In the meantime, we love you, we thank you A BILLION times for the orders you place, it's just fuel for our engine (questionable metaphor, we agree 🚗)... We wish you to listen to yourself, to take care of yourself and of course to enjoy it for yourself too, to reinvent yourself (even if you are perfect, yes, 💓).

Clementine & Plum