A New York lingerie company, Journelle, truly achieves their strategic statement “[making] women feel amazing every day”.  During a time when other companies were cutting costs and releasing employees due to the recession, Claire Chambers, the CEO of Journelle, decided to increase her staff as well as upping their training.

What I think made Journelle successful in this time was properly identifying the opportunities provided by the recession: other firms cutting costs and therefore having weaker service and consumers looking to fill the gap left by those companies.  Through this examination, Chambers created shared value by creating better value propositions for both men and women, resulting in a 55% increase in profits.  Despite this, I disagree with Chamber’s idea of increasing staff.  Although the end result was a success, there was a great deal of risk associated with her decision considering the economy was in a recession.  Extra training for existing staff as opposed to hiring more staff and having to train them as well would have been a better idea.  A change in organizational structure would have worked as well, instead of having each staff member helping a customer, having a system where certain employees identify a customer’s needs and then passing them on to a different employee, presumably an expert in that category, would make the whole system more efficient while still providing excellent service.

Source: https://hbr.org/2012/10/how-this-lingerie-store-booste