Friday, August 29, 2014

Employee Spotlight: Meet Terri! (...TAKE 2?)

The Paper Style Blog doesn't often feature articles using the first person. Most articles are written using the "editorial we" because The PaperStyle Blog is a representation of Paper Style as a whole. The author of any given article is merely a spokesperson on the blog, on behalf of the company.

But I have a funny story, so I'm going to write this blog post as myself. Allow me to introduce me: Aimee, Social Media Coordinator for Paperstyle.com.

I've worked for Paper Style for a little over two years now, and as you can all see on our sidebar on the right side of your screen, The PaperStyle Blog has been around longer than that. Before I came along, the blog was run by another member of the Paper Style team. About a week ago, I decided I wanted to write a blog post for this week featuring an employee who wears, like, a billion different hats and does some really cool stuff here at PS HQ. I had it all figured it out. I was going to have her chronicle all the things that she did in a day and blog about it for our interested readers. I was even going to call it Employee Spotlight: Meet Terri!
TK!
Turns out, someone beat me to it. As I wrote out the title to the post, I thought to myself, huh, that sounds familiar.

Now, when I took on the role of Social Media Coordinator and we really stepped up our blog game in 2013, I made sure to read our entire blog. You know, five years worth of blog posts. No big deal. So since the title sounded familiar, I figured there must have already been a post with that title. Not for Terri, surely, but for someone.

As it would turn out, three years ago (almost to the day!) The PaperStyle Blog featured a blog post about our Merchandising Manager, Terri. It was called Employee Spotlight - Meet Terri!

...I would like to emphasize the difference between using a colon and a dash, because I refuse to believe that I thought I had this cute and original title and then it ALREADY EXISTED.

To sum up the coincidence: same person, same title, almost same day, three years later. Craziness, no?

Anyway, I decided to combine the old post with this new one to preserve my pride and make an even better blog post. It's impressive to see the difference between the first article and all the things that Paper Style is involved in now. The craziest thing, though, is that Terri looks practically identical. Good genes, that one.

Anyway, here's the original Employee Spotlight - Meet Terri!

And here's what Terri's up to these days!

On an average day, Terri comes in early in the morning. Like, real early. Stock orders have usually piled up overnight, so Terri pulls all of the stock to fill the orders, takes them to the shipping department to be boxed up and then places orders (usually for Caspari paper products) for whatever items we're running low on. Terri is in charge of maintaining relationships and orders with many of the brands that we carry on our website. So, basically, she's got lots of friends. 



Periodically, Terri picks specific designs from our website to be used in emails that go out to all of our customers. Because Terri has a close relationship with all of our designers and ultimately chooses which designs we'll sell, she definitely has a great sense of what's popular and what people will most want to see. And because of that skill set, a large part of her job is merchandising and re-merchandising the content on our site. She'll make sure that the most popular invitations are right where people will be able to find them, and that products that aren't selling are removed, to keep the process of choosing your invitation convenient. 

Also because of those relationships with our designers, if a customer calls with special requests pertaining to an invitation, Terri will email the specific designer to see if the request can be addressed. She also sends out weekly emails to the designers with calls for specific types of stationery or invitations, for particular events or holidays. Essentially, anything having to do with our designers and/or designs is right in Terri's wheelhouse. In our current partnership with Laura Ashley, for example, Terri works with Michael, our Graphics Specialist, to develop designs and get approvals. 

But even all of these things don't encapsulate Terri's job. Though some of her responsibilities aren't every day things, it's important to note that she also helps put stock shipments away when the shipping department is too busy. She coordinates the process of receiving, organizing and stocking large shipments of holiday products (literal Christmas in July, no joke). And these are just the things that we see her do. She's got a lot of hats. Fortunately, she looks good in hats, so her job is a perfect fit for her. 

If you have a question for Terri, or you just want to tell her how awesome she is, you can email her at terrik@paperstyle.com, or comment below!

Happy Friday!

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