A day of work at E+S is always fun, especially when you are surrounded by coworkers who have basically become family and amazing customers who have become friends. One of our favorite times of the day is when our UPS guy Donald, brings us a shipment of new arrivals! It’s like Christmas day opening each box and pulling out all the new items. You should see the way we react, it’s hysterical.

Behind The Scenes:
But what happens once we get these new arrivals opened up? This is where you, the customer, have inspired us to write this blog post about what happens behind the scenes.

The New Arrivals Are Here:
Once we pop that box open it gets all types of crazy in our back room, from excitement, to massive amounts of plastic…I mean seriously, every brand we carry individually wraps every single item in its own plastic bag and then puts them all together in another plastic bag. And don’t even get me started on all of the silica gel packets; they fall out of every plastic bag like confetti all over the floor. But once that is done we get each item separated out, then we begin to hang and separate inventory for our website!

Get the Prices:
Then we get the prices from our Boss, Jamie, and begin to input all the new inventory in the computer and start printing tag labels. It’s a little tedious, but very efficient! Then we label our own tags and individually tag each piece of inventory.

It’s Getting Steamy:
Then Dun Dun Dun…the steaming begins! That back room starts to feel like Southeast Texas after a long rainy day, PURE humidity. On a brighter note, steaming is very therapeutic. Some of our best life problem solving solutions has come forth during a good steam session.

Styled to Perfection:
Once this is all completed, one of my favorite parts …STYLING! We get to take all of these awesome new arrivals and put them into outfit form from head to toe. When we get that all figured out my next favorite part comes shortly after, PHOTO SHOOT DAY!
– Side Note, but just so ya’ll know- Not sharing every new outfit we put together with our customers immediately is probably the hardest task for our boss!

Model Behavior:
Spring is our favorite season to do photo shoots, because the weather is normally decent. The weather is always the biggest factor of how a photo shoot is going to go since we do our photos outside. When its winter, the girls have goose bumps and shiver, but just keep on smiling and having a good time. Summer is probably everyone’s least favorite; I mean can you blame us? Our most recent photo shoot was brutal. I even got sunburnt from just being out there helping out with getting the girls dressed. Now imagine being one of those girls, on this thick, humid, smoldering hot day and having to change in a pop up tent outside! I have no idea how they didn’t quite literally melt. There was a lot of sweat, but even more laughter. The girls are such troopers when it comes to photo shoots and they never complain. There are constant earring changes, shoe changes, from shirts and jeans to dresses, and everything in between.

What Does This Top Say to You?
Then we begin working on the website. We pull that entire inventory we put aside for our online shoppers and house it in another location than the store inventory. We get that question, “Is the online inventory the same as the store inventory?” a lot and we are here to give you that answer, No. We are just like any other online retail store; the two inventories are separate and different, so always check both locations if you can’t find your size! Once we have all that inventory in front of us, we begin to give each item a name so that everyone can identify the items. A lot of the naming process goes like, “So what does this top say to you when you look at it?” or “What does this item remind you of?” We get a little writers block from time to time so it takes a lot of terrible suggestions, google searching, and brainstorming, to get the right name.

“Describe It As If You Were Telling Your Friend On The Phone What It Looks Like”:
This is the way we go about descriptions for products. I never really read the descriptions on other websites, until I started doing them myself for the E+S website. I have a newfound admiration for all of the little things that go into building a website, because though they are little they are mighty!

Picture Perfect:
When we get the pictures back, first we go on and on about how awesome they came out! Once we’ve stopped gushing about the outfits and whose contour looked bomb in the photos, we plug them into the website for everyone to be able to shop! The pictures are kind of a still shot of all the hard work that went into them! There is so much that goes into the process of a photo shoot that most people don’t know about. It is always so rewarding to see the outcome and to see how all of our customers react to all of the new items!

Recap:
So everything –minus the photoshoot- is what happens on a day to day basis here at E+S, in between helping our fabulous customers of course! The photo shoots are normally a once a week deal! We have some pretty amazing photographers, which makes this process even more enjoyable! When they say “It takes a village”…they were not kidding!

Xoxo, Kaitlin