A look back at 2022

So 2022 was a busy year!

The last few Decembers, I've talked about how strange and unpredictable the previous year has been.

2022 has also been unpredictable, but for another reason:

No one expected it to be this busy!

Going in to the year, we had planned for an increase in demand.

We knew that there were lots of customers who hadn't been able to have their shows yet because of the various lock-downs and so we were preparing for a lot to happen at once.

A lot certainly happened...

The period between 1st April and 30th June this year was 347% busier for us than pre-pandemic levels.

November 2021 had been our busiest month on record, but November 2022 was 60% busier!

As a company, we are constantly evolving and improving to be able grow sustainably. This isn’t just increasing stock - a lot of the changes are behind the scenes, improving systems and procedures.

This year we had to speed the implementation of a lot of these things up to allow us to handle the demand we were faced with.

We recruited more staff, we added more stock, we completely re-wrote some of our systems of work, we added more technology and we moved our website and systems to a new platform allowing us to handle the number of visitors we now have.

With more customers, comes more communication.

This year we’ve launched a phone number, WhatsApp, contact widget and help area answering some of the most common questions. We’ve also implemented a new help desk system so our Customer Care team can see any communication you have with us, no matter which method you used.

This has meant that our median response time has been under 7 minutes from a message first being sent to us and most queries have been answered in under two messages.

People and planet matter

As we grow our team, our responsibility to our workforce also grows.

This year we have been accredited as a Living Wage Employer. This means we will always pay our staff a fair rate based on the real cost of living and exceeding the government’s minimum wage. We also now offer our staff private health insurance at no cost to them.

We continue to be the world’s only Carbon Neutral dance costume hire company, and the only one that plants trees each time you hire costumes.

So far not only have we planted over 35,000 trees, but we have also provided over 300 work days to people in developing nations to plant, nurture and look after these trees.

Thank you for being a part of this with us.

We continue to look to the future and all that it brings and we look forward to sharing that future with you.

All that leaves is for me to wish you a very happy, peaceful and safe Christmas and we’ll see you in the new year.

Aleksis Gailans
Founder, Costume Source