While in our business no two days are alike as each day brings new adventures and challenges, this blog will highlight some of the main duties involved in the day-to-day running of Manatee. As Manatee is formed of a close-knit team, each person takes on a variety of roles within the company, as well as supporting each other throughout the day with certain tasks to ensure maximum accuracy is achieved.
Customer Service & Support:
As we pride ourselves on our fast response times, one of the ongoing tasks throughout each day is to check that any emails, social media messages, or other queries are answered as thoroughly and effectively as possible. We know how frustrating it is to feel like you're waiting an eternity for a response, especially to a question that is time-sensitive, so we won't keep you waiting. Our inbox notifications are turned on, and one of us will be here to help.
On top of this, we frequently fill any gaps in our general schedule with potential customer, existing partnerships, and B2B meetings. Whilst pre-covid we would often attend various in-person meetings to discuss merchandise, partnership and other opportunities, these meetings in more recent times have taken place via online platforms.
Production Management & Quality Checks:
Every product purchased at Manatee goes through numerous quality checks and controls before being sent out to the final consumer. From the moment an order is placed, we collect and process all relevant information, and manually check each file to ensure any relevant customisations, sizes, designs and other specified adaptions are correct before the print stage is able to begin. As the production management process is crucial to the final outcome of your products, this task is always supported by multiple staff to minimise the potential to overlook any problems that could otherwise occur.
Logistics & Smooth Delivery:
Once the production phase of an order is completed, we will move onto ensuring that the products are correctly packaged, labelled, and ready to be sent to the customer. Typically, we will divide the logistics work between staff in the two areas of label (address information) creation and packaging. Whilst this area might not sound like the most fun part of our job, it's extremely rewarding to know that customers will soon be receiving their orders, and we enjoy adding extra details such as bonus Manatee stickers, flyers, often other promotional items and placing jerseys in our sleek branded polybags.
Design Services:
Another activity that requires daily attention is creating and finalising customer designs - either fulfilling design orders, or redrawing existing designs into our files suitable for print. As we work with custom products, it is necessary for every customer to first have a design prepared, revised (if necessary) and confirmed before we can start the production process. This part of the business often allows for us to express full creative freedom and explore new techniques. As we are designing for our customers, it is extremely important that we take the time to listen to any feedback and inspiration to produce a satisfying outcome - therefore, even the most technically 'simple' design, might take a little bit more time as an overall task as we have multiple conversations with the customer in order to achieve the final result.
Content Creation & Planning:
As all of our mainstream content; including photography, social media posts, presentations, product catalogues and graphic banners are also created in-house by our staff, this task can require a larger part of attention during the day - particularly when launching a new product or updating our existing branding. When it comes to our basic content schedule, we like to ensure that we share photos from a range of our latest productions, and also provide a mix of informative posts or blogs that may be useful for new or existing customers. In general, our content plan is often spontaneous, depending on which products we would like to feature or have recently produced. However, when we have bigger product launches or a specific event lined up, we may start planning months in advance. To give an example, we already have some big ideas for our upcoming '5th Birthday of Manatee' celebrations in September..
That's a very rough glimpse into our day! Of course, other tasks such as product development, event planning and legal business upkeep are continually running in the background whilst our day-to-day roles are taking the forefront to ensure the smooth running of Manatee and achieve customer satisfaction.
