Page 14 of Snug in Iceland
She was due to meet Nick, the manager of the Snug build team, along with the guy from Reykjavik building control. It was a chance to look over the unit together and make sure everyone was on the same page for how the work was going to proceed.
Nick was already waiting inside the unit. He and Rachel had worked on several of the UK stores together so they were well acquainted.
“Hi, Rachel! Great to see you!” he said, giving her a friendly hug, “What do you think of it?”
They stood just inside the door, surveying the space. It was much as Rachel had seen the night before albeit much brighter now that the lights were on. The ceiling was lower than they were used to in other stores but that would give it a cosy feel. The floor was wooden-block, in a parquet design and in terrible condition but it was being covered with vinyl flooring so it didn’t matter and the white-painted walls were pockmarked with holes from previous fixtures, most of which had been removed. Walking through to the back of the store, a staircase led down to a storeroom, toilet and office space.
“It looks good?” Rachel said uncertainly, looking at Nick for his opinion on it.
“Yeah, I think it’s in good shape, nothing immediately jumps out as a problem. The fittings you’ve decided on should all work in here, so yeah, we can start making plans.”
He smiled which made her breathe a sigh of relief. It was one thing planning a store on paper, but until you saw the bare bones of a unit, you didn’t really know what you were dealing with. Rachel set her laptop down on the old shop counter so that she could start working.
“Let me take the building control guy round when he arrives so you can get on. There shouldn’t be any problems anyway.”
Well, that flippant comment jinxed it. An hour later Nick and Rachel were shell-shocked. The building control officer had informed them that they couldn’t lay any floor covering because the current policy was to restore existing flooring wherever possible. The shop was in the old part of town and they had a programme of conservation and restoration for the older shops. It was a huge oversight on the part of the acquisition team not to have known that this was the case before they took the unit on.
Although it didn’t sound like a huge problem, Rachel knew the impact it would have on their schedule. They would have to re-lay the damaged parts of the parquet, then sand and varnish the floor which would look beautiful but that needed to happen first before anything else could even start and it would take longer than they had set aside in the schedule.
Having spoken to the heating and air-conditioning company, they could cope with the delay but the fire alarm people couldn’t and would need to come in later than planned so potentially they were looking at a minimum two-week delay.
Rachel’s most immediate problem was to sort the floor out. The company they had booked for fitting the vinyl mercifully did provide a sanding and finishing service and they had a contractor who could replace the damaged parquet blocks but as Rachel had thought, it would take much longer and cost a lot more money than the simple floor covering she had planned. Suddenly the whole project felt like it was falling apart around her ears. Get a grip, she told herself after a couple of minutes of sitting with her head in her hands. It was just a schedule change, that was all. She just had to re-arrange a few things. There was nothing for it but to just crack on. She needed caffeine and some fresh air but not before she had phoned Luisa.
“These things happen, Rachel, we know that, don’t worry. We can save some money elsewhere and we always build a contingency in, that’s what it’s for.”
Luisa sounded so relaxed about it that Rachel could feel the tension ebbing out of her body.
“Time is the main issue. You’d better have a word with the hotel to see if you can extend by a couple of weeks once you know the impact on the schedule.”
“Thanks, Luisa. I’ll try and get started on whatever we can in the meantime.”
“I’ve heard today that we’ve just appointed the new store manager. Why don’t you contact her and start work on the Design Call together.”
The Design Call was an initiative that had started in London. There was a constant stream of designers wanting to pitch their products to Snug, so they had introduced the idea of open calls where anyone who wanted to pitch would be guaranteed a five-minute interview to show their products. It worked amazingly well in helping Snug to source amazing things which were not produced commercially and so would normally be off their radar, and it gave designers the opportunity to be stocked on the high street; normally a very expensive and time-consuming business.
It was considered by the company to be critical to the success of the new store to stock Icelandic designers who were as yet undiscovered. It was going to be a harder job than it was in the UK because the word needed to be spread about the Design Call and as a company, they had no existing links in the country at all. Normally it wouldn’t be in Rachel’s remit to take on the search for products but this was a special case. Luisa had spearheaded the initial searches in Oslo and Stockholm and it had worked well. And now that the new manager was going to be at a loose end as well, it seemed like the perfect way to fill the extra couple of weeks.
Rachel strolled up the road to fetch coffee for herself and Nick. It was finally just about light at 11 am, so instead of going straight to the coffee shop, she took the opportunity to walk around the block. The buildings were so quirky; most of them had coloured corrugated roofs and cladding and were arranged in quite a higgledy-piggledy way. There were quite a few houses amongst them with gardens, which was a strange juxtaposition with being in the middle of a capital city.
A beautifully knitted hat caught her eye in a shop window on the next street along from Laugavegur. It made her think of Jonas again because it was very similar to the one he’d been wearing and would match her new gloves nicely. She thought how funny it was that she had begun to associate Jonas with knitwear.
Some steps led down into the little nook of a shop which was crammed to the rafters with balls of wool of every shade you could imagine. She scanned around quickly to see where the hats were but couldn't see that there were any, just the one in the window.
“Hi, I was hoping to buy a hat like the one in the window?” she asked shyly, anxious in assuming the woman would understand English, but she needn’t have worried, she spoke excellent English, just like every other Icelander Rachel had met so far.
“Ah,” she smiled, “you have to knit the hat yourself.”
“Oh. Well, thanks anyway.”
As she turned to leave the lady asked, “Can you knit?”
“I learnt when I was a child but I’ve never made anything.”
“You should try, it is very easy to knit a hat like that. Why don’t you come back this evening or tomorrow and I can help you start?”
Good grief, Rachel thought, she wanted to have the hat now, not in a year or two’s time.
“Okay, thanks, I will if I have chance.”
