DCO 2020 year in review.

DCO 2020 year in review.

In all the busy of this year it feels like we’ve never really taken the time to celebrate what we’ve accomplished. So before we get rolling with 2021, I wanted to highlight some of the great work our team has delivered and also thank you, our customers, as we are so grateful for all the support we've had throughout the year.

 

Helping others create spaces they love

At DCO we are on a mission to help others create spaces they love. We do this by making decorating simple and accessible, without compromise. These are some nice new words you won’t have really heard from us before, but what they represent is our essence, it’s our reason for existing and what we aim to do every day. It is the best way Helen and I can succinctly describe to our team, customers and community what DCO is all about. And we love it!

Getting it right for our customers

Throughout all of this year's uncertainty, one thing has remained constant – we make it happen for our customers. Through determination to overcome all of the challenges presented by this year's events, we’ve managed to maintain a 4.9* Feefo rating and an average Net Promoter Score of 92. This really is a fantastic testament to the work our team have done. We also owe a huge thanks to you, our customers, for your patience and loyalty throughout this year and all the recommendations you’ve made to friends and family championing what we do and the service we provide, it’s been amazing.

 

How we support and care for our customers and each other is not new to us. It has been set by our family since the business started as a decorator’s merchant over 30 years ago. It is deeply embedded in our DNA. It’s just the way we do things around here and I’m so proud the quality of our service and products are being recognised in the feedback we’ve received.

 

Delivering as a team

We talk a lot about being a family business and the importance of this in shaping our culture and this really played itself out through the year. Our relationships have been tested to extremes, but everyone has embraced the challenges, looked out for one another and supported each other to make it happen for our customers. There are so many stories to share where the team have gone above and beyond, these are a few that really stand out for me:

  • At the start of lockdown when our shop had to close and it felt like the whole of the UK wanted to decorate, our teams in the shop and office quickly retrained, helped us convert the shop into a mixing, picking and packing area and everyone spent the next few months working together to get orders out the door.
  • We also knew that we had to keep decorators working even though the shop was closed, so we established a call / text and collect service. Due to demand, we had to process these through the evening until 11pm each weeknight to ensure our decorators could pick up materials the following morning to keep working.
  • Many of you will have seen that there have been some significant paint shortages throughout the year. To manage this, our fantastic team worked tirelessly to contact customers with suitable alternatives and options so they could still decorate, and whenever possible if the paint wasn’t coming to us, we went and collected it from depots and factories around the country.
  • For two weeks in November we had four production and shop team members out of the business as they were required to self-isolate (although thankfully did not have Covid-19). This might not sound like a big number, but as a small business, it was a massive challenge. Again the team showed their determination to never let customers down and everyone jumped in to ensure we processed orders on time. It was a tough couple of weeks but an unbelievable achievement. We delivered our busiest month ever, never missed a delivery date and maintained our packing and mixing accuracy for the period.

We have also had to make sure that throughout the pandemic we are working safely; it was and remains our absolute priority. Like many businesses, we have made a lot of changes to our working practices and policies to comply with government guidelines and also to ensure our team feel safe and comfortable at work.

 

Finding better ways to do things in a small business way

There have been so many moments during the pandemic that could have beaten us, and many probably would have forgiven us if things had slipped a bit. But we've never given up and tried to make positive decisions that are aligned to our values and what matters most to our customers and team.

Managing demand and growing pains

This was a tricky balancing act at the time, which Helen and I agonised over for a while, but in hindsight it’s the best and most obvious decision we made. At the start of lockdown, the demand for our service was unimaginable and we simply could not keep up. We managed this initially through pushing delivery days out, but then stock became unstable and delivery dates longer than we thought was acceptable. The short-term financial opportunity was not worth the potential impact of letting customers down, so we created order windows so we could manage demand and only take the orders we knew we could fulfil.

The situation has helped us recognise when to trust our gut and to remember the world won't end based on any one decision we make!

Behind the scenes we learnt a lot from this, scaled our operation and we are now comfortably processing more orders than at the start of lockdown, helping more people than ever to create spaces they love. To deliver this we now have 4 mixing machines for our online operation and over double the number of team members.

Working with what we’ve got

Our capacity issues were predominantly due to available space at our premises. Moving in the middle of lockdown didn’t make sense operationally so we had to re-think how to use the space we had available. After a lot of negotiation with the landlord (Helen’s dad!), a huge effort went into renovating parts of the warehouse and creating new office space for the growing team to be able to work safely. We also made the decision to invest in new technology, machinery and equipment to speed up our processes and enhance our customers decorating experience so we can continue to deliver an exceptional service.

 

 

Rolling into 2021

Our focus is now on the new year and continuing to share our passion for decorating with our amazing community of decorating enthusiasts. Our family is really important to us and we’ve got some exciting changes coming to make DCO an even better place to be a part of. We’ll also continue to improve customers decorating experience and how we look after the wider community in doing so.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us this year, and I hope you will continue to be part of our decorating community into 2021 and beyond.

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