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Store Administrator, Kering, Helps Revamp Sales Strategies in Peru

As part of Nest’s Professional Fellowship Program partnership with Kering Foundation, London Store Administrator, Kering, Magda Tomaszewksi, is currently in Peru’s remote Andes mountains participating in a two-week mentorship project alongside the Nest Guild artisans of Awamaki. Leveraging her impressive background in retail sales, Magda is assisting Awamaki in enhancing its onsite shop experience, both operationally and visually, to help drive sales.

As a member of the Nest Guild, Awamaki’s weaving expertise is matched only by its commitment to investing in women’s skills, leadership, and access to economic opportunity. The business currently sells its beautiful hand woven accessories, apparel, and textiles both through its shop and also through international wholesale, requiring an efficient backend operations system. Within the shop itself, Awamaki has found itself often running low on stock for its best-selling items. This is where Magda’s expertise comes in to assist the Awamaki team in optimizing its processes for processing orders, tracking inventory, and establishing re-stocking guidelines.  

With already one week passed in Peru, Magda brought us behind the scenes of the project so far, reflecting: “I really feel like my very wide retail and customer experience is something important here. The product is amazing and people are absolutely enthusiastic about what the work that Awamaki does… Of course elements like visual display are important, as people’s brains are attracted to structure, light and space. By reorganizing the store in more spacious, lighter and homier way, we have already seen improvement in sales. The idea of gathering and grouping “gifts for her” and “gifts for him” has also helped shoppers consider purchasing more than one item per transaction.”

But Magda says the main achievement for her personally has been establishing a relationship with Laddy, the store coordinator. “Without my having any Spanish language skills, we were able to communicate; and whatever improvements I have suggested, she has accepted openly. She has even asked me to create a presentation on some of my suggestions, so that she can continue to refer to it in the future.”

Kennedy Leavens, Executive Director of Awamaki, says this achievement, and all of Magda’s hard work so far, has not gone unnoticed. “I have been especially impressed with the way Magda has figured out how to communicate with our Peru staff and build relationships despite the language barrier. She is so passionate about what she is doing, and she brings highly specialized skills that we just don’t have on our team in Peru. She is making such a big difference, and giving us so many new ideas.”

We look forward both to following Magda’s journey during her second week in Peru, as well as to building upon the work accomplished in partnership with Awamaki.

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