Andréanne's Journals - April ✍🏼

I often wonder about the people who read these journal entries. Are you a customer? An entrepreneur? A fashion fan or book lover? Someone who just got lost on Insta and came across my profile? Let me know in the comments! I’m interested in finding out!

And you, how did your March go? Are you looking forward to spring? Personally, this year spring is mostly making me think about how my dog Rofi is definitely going to be making a mess of the house on a consistent basis. But you know what they say… you just have to let go. I can’t wait to see how my ‘letting go’ will go ;) In the end, I love my dog so much it doesn’t matter. By the time you read this journal, Rofi will be 1 year old!

Spring and summer are mega seasons at Womance. There is no shortage of work in the office, warehouse or the stores. These are the months when we present our biggest collections and the frenzy is felt in all departments. It’s really nice! Everyone in the team is so excited to see your reactions to the new collections. It’s always a mixture of excitement and anxiety haha… ( it’s an anxiety that you won’t like what we’ve created and one that I hope will eventually pass.) I feel it a little bit more than usual this year, probably because we are coming back with a new swimsuit collection that we hope you’ll love as much as we do. It’s so beautiful!

Last year, we decided to put the swimsuit project on hold due to some poor experiences we had during the first round. Making swimsuits is far from simple and we wanted to make sure we were working with the best partners and doing our best work to relaunch this adventure. Our beachwear collection won’t just include swimsuits; it’s going to include beachwear, bags, caps, sunglasses… I’m not sure if you will have already seen all the styles available by the time you read this journal, but my goodness, I’m so excited about the whole thing. It’s in my favourite palette. For the first time ever, we sent part of our team outside the country to do a photo shoot! Our artistic director Marie-Pier went to Tulum to take the photos and we can confidently say it was a huge success. +++BRAVO MARIE! WELL DONE!

We will also be doing events in the stores for the launch of this collection and there will be lots of gifts. Our calendar is full and we LOVE it!

Another small update is that we had a challenging month of April. We had to deal with a major bug on our website the day after we launched a bunch of new products. We always release new products at 8 p.m. on a Wednesday, and the next day is always a great sales day! Seriously, it’s a trip. But from 8 in the morning to 1 in the afternoon, most of our products were mysteriously showing up as out of stock even though our warehouse was full. Every size except for XS had somehow disappeared. Our sizing, barcode and inventory records were gone. EVERYTHING. It had never happened to us before (and to be honest I think a lot of us still have a little post-traumatic shock from the whole thing haha.) Luckily, the web girls and a super talented/geeky/turbo tech expert we hired from Toronto and have worked with for several years helped us solve the problem. It’s definitely still a bummer since we know that many customers probably went to the site only to falsely discover all our new items were unavailable, and it’s easy to forget to check back later to see if items have been restocked. I’m sure we lost a lot of sales that day, but that’s life! It can happen and it’s far from being the end of the world. Looking back, the best part of the experience was seeing the women on our team who rushed to understand the problem and find a solution. No one panicked. No one was angry. Everyone was thinking positively! "We'll find a solution and it's okay! We'll make up sales by adjusting our posts and stories and talking to customers about it later! Let's go!"

My dad would say “that’s just part of the job!” As for me, I blame it on Mercury and accept that sometimes these types of things are just out of our control!

- Andréanne Marquis, founder of Womance & Sans-Façon Cosmetics