“It’s a completely new challenge for me”: one Chartered Manager’s life in retail

Damien Pugh CMgr MCMI never thought he’d end up in retail, despite his father’s job in the sector. But that’s where his career led him. He is now an area manager for MINISO UK, at a time when the company is expanding its UK footprint.

“I’ve got three store openings this August,” Damien says. “It’s the first time I’ve been involved in multiple openings at once, so it’s a completely new kind of challenge for me. I want to see what positive contribution I can make.”

Damien studied linguistics and history at Nottingham Trent University, but fell into retail when he left.

“I came out of uni with a degree I couldn’t really do much with, as I didn’t want to be a lecturer or a teacher,” he says.

Damien’s dad was a store manager and put him to work in a shop for two weeks.

“I went, ‘Oh, I could see myself doing this!’” He ended up working as a store manager by age 24, for a Holland & Barrett store in south Birmingham.

People management in retail

While he hadn’t intended to build a career in retail, Damien quickly progressed in the industry. In his first full year at Holland & Barrett, he took the store from 22nd out of 23 in KPI performance in the region to first.

“I was really happy with that, and it gave me a bit of confidence early on that I might be OK at this.”

From there, Damien was promoted to a store in Solihull, where, again, he took a struggling store to top for KPI performance in the region. The key to all this, Damien says, is people management.

“Every store sells products, but it’s how we treat the people in the store, and then the impact that has on the customer service, that makes us different,” he says. “For me, it’s always been about the people.”