We caught up with Michelle Fellows, People & Development Director at certified UK Top Employer The Perfume Shop, who shares what makes the organisation a Top Employer, how they retain talent in a competitive industry and the ways AI is being implemented within the HR function.

Introduce yourself and tell us about your organisation

I’m Michelle Fellows , People & Development Director at The Perfume Shop. I’ve worked in the business for 24 years and led the team for the last 20 years.

The Perfume Shop was established 32 years ago and our purpose is simple – to be the UK & Ireland’s number destination for perfume. Our brand values are “We’re Expert, We’re Passionate & We Care”, knowing perfume like the backs of our hands, like no one else on the high street.

With 2,000 employees across the UK & Ireland of which more than 1,500 are based in our stores, we have the best-trained people with expert perfume knowledge ready to showcase their passion for perfume by offering the finest advice.  We stock the widest and newest fragrance range with exclusive brands and best offerings for customers.

We are also proud to be an O+O business (offline + online), with around 1 in 4 of our sales made online via our website. Our Store teams are supported by a Distribution team of 70 people based in our Warehouse in Dunstable and a team of 200 in our Head Office, which we call ‘Scentquarters’, in High Wycombe.

We call ourselves The Perfume People and you can see our Talent, Passion and Spark in everything we do.  We care about our customers, we care about each other and we care about being a sustainable business.

What makes The Perfume Shop a Top Employer?

It’s our approach to our people. Our people have always been at the heart of our business strategy because we recognise that happy people mean happy customers, creating long term loyalty and value for the business.

We take great pride in our positive culture, but we don’t take it for granted.  We continually look to improve by benchmarking ourselves externally, listening to our people and taking action on what we learn.

We were very proud to be accredited as a Top Employer for the first time in 2023.  It’s given us confidence to really shout about our people credentials.  We were delighted to understand the areas where we excel and find out where we could be better.

What is the biggest people challenge your business faces? And what are you doing to meet this challenge?

Retaining our people remains our biggest challenge and it’s the KPI that we’re all focused on in our team. We’ll continue to invest in our pay rates for Stores. We’re an accredited Real Living Wage employer and we’ve seen the difference that this makes in attracting and retaining people.

We’ll continue to focus on career development.  Retail is a brilliant place to create a career and we’re proud to ‘grow our own’.  We’ll continue to offer a wide range of apprenticeships across the business.  We also have a wide range of internal learning programmes that support people to progress to their next role, or develop key skills in the role they have.  We also enable a handful of people to attend prestigious leadership development programmes offered by the BRC, which is the gold standard in our sector.

We’ll continue to listen, learn and respond to the feedback and ideas from our teams.  As a smaller organisation we’re able to be agile and respond quickly to our people when they tell us that we’re getting something right, or wrong!

Tell us about a recent HR initiative you have instigated within your organisation that you are most proud of?

Given the cost of living crisis, I’m really proud of the way we’ve invested in our teams and ensured that they can get more pay in their pockets.  There are 3 key ways we’ve responded to the cost of living crisis:

Living Wage – as a real Living Wage employer we can demonstrate our commitment to our employees and that we want to pay our people a wage that enables them to meet their every day needs.

Incentive pay – Across October, November and December we offer everyone the opportunity to earn extra in commission, including our 800 temporary Sales Assistants who join us to support with Christmas Trading.  In 2023 we paid an additional £250 (on average) to every Sales Advisor across the business.  It’s our way of ensuring that we retain our teams at a critical time of year for the business, and enables us to recognise and reward their hard work.  We also have bonus schemes for Store Management, our Head Office teams and Warehouse management.

Financial wellbeing focus – We’ve launched Wagestream across the UK business. Wagestream is a service that allows employees to access a portion of their earned wages (streaming) before payday, helping them manage those unexpected bills.  Wagestream helps employees to manage their finances more effectively, provides financial education and enables them to create saving pots.

How is AI helping you – or challenging you in terms of your people practices?

AI is an area I’m personally hugely excited about. It provides a brilliant opportunity to help us become more efficient in the way we do things and the way in which we support the needs of our people across The Perfume Shop.

We’ve already created bots which automate the administrative parts of our recruitment and onboarding processes.  We’ve recently launched a chat bot to provide policy advice.  Automating the routine tasks makes sense, it enables the team to spend more time doing the things that AI can’t, like partnering, coaching and advising, adding value to the business.

But AI also poses some challenges for us.  We need to ensure that our people are equipped and ready for the changes that AI brings. We need to reskill and upskill our workforce, foster a culture of learning and innovation, and provide support and guidance. We also need to ensure that our people feel valued and engaged, and that they have a sense of purpose and meaning in their work.  We’ll need to ensure that AI develops in a way that is ethical, transparent and fair.

We’ll need to balance the human and the machine aspects of our people practice. We need to leverage the strengths of both AI and human intelligence, and find the optimal combination for each task and situation.  We also need to preserve the human touch and connection that make our brand unique and appealing.

We’re really delighted with the response to Wagestream. To date since launch we have 36% enrolment across the business, with 2563 streams and 162 saving pots created.  We considered carefully whether it was right thing to do as we were concerned that giving people access to a portion of their pay early would create more financial hardship, but the data and insights from Wagestream showed us that the opposite was true and when people can access their pay when they need it, it reduces their use of pay day lenders, credit cards or other forms of high interest debt.

Have you any new DEI initiatives you can tell us about that help you tap into fresh sources of talent?

In the last 12 months we’ve done a lot to ensure we support women across their working lives.  86% of our employees at The Perfume Shop are women so it was important that we responded to their feedback.

This year we’ve reviewed our maternity pay offering and implemented enhanced pay for Store Managers, Deputy Managers and Head Office employees.  Eligible employees will now receive full pay for the first 13 weeks, followed by 50% pay for a further 13 weeks.  This is a significant investment, but protects people from worrying about their finances at an important time for them and their family.  It’s early days in terms of understanding the impact, but it’s proved popular with people who are already on leave, or about to go on leave and will help us attract and retain people who are thinking about starting a family.

Every year we appoint a number of Sustainability Champions from across the business.  They help us drive our Sustainability agenda across the People, Product and Planet pillars with fresh eyes and fresh ideas.  They developed a Period Positivity policy which sets out our approach to periods.  We want to provide an open and supportive environment where people who have periods feel comfortable, they can discuss periods if needed, and have access to period products in an emergency.

We have also developed a Menopause policy which was formed by holding a series of listening groups with women in Perimenopause or Menopause, so we could understand what they needed, because fostering a culture of openness surrounding menopause is important here.  We want all employees to feel able to talk about menopause and be aware of the symptoms. For those experiencing menopause we want to provide information and support to be their best selves during this stage of life.

Around International Women’s Day in January we took the opportunity to really celebrate women here at The Perfume Shop, featuring women across the business across a wide range of career stages and seniority.  We’re very proud to have a female Managing Director and a Leadership team which is 78% female.

Inspiring women to understand that we care about them, that we want to support them and offer brilliant careers is a key part of our retention strategy.

What’s next? Tell us about a new project that you’re most excited about?

2024 will be the year where we begin to harness AI, so working across the business and getting everyone thinking about the opportunities for them personally will be my mission!

Get in touch to discover more about the Top Employers Certification Programme and how it can help your organisation grow as an employer of choice.

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