After six years as a consultant, she has built quite a big network and has many regular hostesses and customers, who she knows very well. After guiding the same customers season after season, she knows their children and their taste and knows exactly what they like and which products she should suggest to them. “I have a customer who always buys clothes, and this season I suggested her to try out the underwear, just one set. And she just called me this morning and said: ‘Laura, that underwear is amazing!’”. Experiences like that makes her love the job as a consultant, although the corona virus has forced her to change her way of working in many ways.

“I did events on Zoom, on Skype and even on WhatsApp, depending on what the customers preferred”, Laura says. She laughs, as she tells that one time on an online event with one of her regular hostesses, the customers even bought more than they usually would, because they had less time for small talk and instead could concentrate on the clothes. She admits being skeptical about online events but now says: “You simply have to embark on it, because any other way simply isn’t possible. It has worked really well and has been so much fun, and we simply chose to make the best out of the situation”.

It was more challenging than she expected, though. The first weekend of the Home Shopping season, she planned a lot of events that she hosted on WhatsApp, because she thought she could easily do them simultaneously. She was stuck to her laptop, iPad and cell phone for hours and tried to keep calm: “It was an incredible amount of work, almost chaotic! But it was so great and I really had fun, and I was so exhausted in the evening. If I had known it would be that crazy, I would have planned it differently, but it was amazing”.

If online events work or not depends on the consultant as well as the customers. “I really had some customers where I thought they would never host anything online, but they still did it because we don’t have any other options so we found a solution”, Laura says. It often took a bit of persuasion but she caught their attention with small videos she recorded herself where she shows a part of the collection. And then she has spent some time explaining to her customers how easy it would actually be to move the events to Zoom to make them feel safe about it.

To Laura it was important to maintain the nice and relaxed atmosphere that she usually experiences at her Home Shopping parties: “I tried to be exactly like I use to. At times I would suddenly notice that I looked totally funny because my hair was every which way, and then I would comment on it and we would all laugh as we normally would.”

She was not used to doing big presentations of the collection, though. At her events it is important to her to mingle around the racks and make time for every customer. She tries to give any one a feeling of being important and show that she has time for their specific questions.

This way she has got to know many of her customers very well: “They are all like friends now, and we always look forward to seeing each other every season. So we were all very sad that we could not meet this season.”

The Coronavirus has caused a lot of trouble, but it has also shown us that we can actually do some things differently, even if you live off a very social concept like Home Shopping. However, let’s cross our fingers that Laura and the other consultants soon again can go out and do what they love the most – meeting all their nice customers face to face.