Department stories: behind the scenes at Liberty

I am in a flap. I am sackably late for Liberty’s 9am Monday briefing in the store’s mock-Tudor atrium, where today staff members stand around the displays of woolly scarves and reps from each department identify ‘something now, something new and something Christmas’ from their stock. General manager Lee Whittle is leading the show. No stranger to tinted moisturiser, with an extraordinarily shiny beard and chunky gold jewellery, here is a character ripe for reality TV. No doubt he will emerge as one of the stars of a new Channel 4 documentary, which could do for the 138-year-old department store what Inside Claridge’s did for the hotel — make celebrities of its staff and, most importantly, get people through its doors.

I arrive for my day working at Liberty just in time to discover that the Liberty of London beauty gift sets are ‘new, new, new and perfect for Christmas’.

Eric Musgrave, editorial director at Drapers, the fashion business bible, tells me that ‘despite booming online sales, Christmas is still a very important time for shops’. Liberty opens its Christmas shop-within-a-shop in September and 20 per cent of the store’s annual turnover is taken in the first three weeks of December. ‘There’s a consumer bubble at the end of the year and great importance placed on money taken in this period,’ says Musgrave. He calls Liberty ‘a treasure box of a store’. This season it predicts selling 110,000 baubles, 1,500 Liberty Advent calendars and 5,500 Liberty giant chocolate coins. But the shop’s overall bestselling gift is a unisex perfume called Escentric Molecules (it sells 150 bottles per day in December), which contains pheromones that make it smell different on every wearer.

After the briefing, with 30 minutes to go before opening, Whittle patrols the floors. I am scuttling around after him when he stops abruptly by one of the pillars that hold up the building. ‘This needs fixing,’ he declares, and in pops handyman Tony with his toolbox. The store was constructed in 1924 from the tim-bers of two ships: HMS Impregnable and HMS Hindustan. It was the brainchild of globetrotter Arthur Lasenby Liberty, who opened the original shop in 1875 and built strong relationships with many leading English designers — a heritage that continues today. Oscar Wilde called it ‘the chosen resort of the artistic shopper’. Tony says, ‘Looking after this place is like caring for a very old, very high-maintenance lady.’

The visual merchandisers have been in since 6.30am, tidying and changing displays, dressing mannequins in new-season clothes and generally making the store not look like it had been ravaged by vultures the previous day. Shop assistants fold, plump and dust while managers fill the tills. There’s a frisson of pre-show excitement before curtain-up at 10am. I start my day on the fourth floor in the Christmas shop, which is staffed by bouncy drama students. Their leader, Richard, is the whippet-thin Head of Christmas. ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘I’m Santa... on a diet.’

My first job is to meet and greet. The shop has been open precisely two and a half minutes, but Japanese families and middle-aged women in Barbours have already found their way up to this winter wonderland. ‘Stand here and hold a basket,’ says Taye, a chirpy 21-year-old, ‘and just make people feel welcome.’ She makes it sound so easy. After a few muttered ‘hellos’ I find my mojo and begin to relish the looks of joy on people’s faces when I make eye contact and fling them a friendly ‘howdy-do’.

At the tills I meet Felicity, a lively redhead who sort of wants to be an actress, and Becky, an English and theatre studies graduate. They were at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer at the same time but didn’t know each other then. ‘MENTAL,’ says Felicity. ‘TOTALLY,’ says Becky. They put me to work bundling purchases in tissue paper. ‘Imagine you’re wrapping fish and chips,’ Becky advises. I drop a £12 bauble on the floor. It smashes, I panic. I wrap Sellotape around the tip of my finger trying to get it off the dispenser, and then I do it again. I’m a shambles. Felicity says you wouldn’t believe how rude some customers can be. Stupid, too: ‘The other week someone came in, stood in the middle of the Christmas shop, which is wall-to-wall baubles, and asked if we sold baubles. I really tried not to laugh,’ she says, assuring me, though, that on the whole Liberty customers are ‘very nice’.

Also behind the counter is Kareem. He is the first 16-year-old to be employed full-time by Liberty and seems to dislike my amateur presence in his department. He is slight and pretty and wears braces on his teeth, but looks like he could out-sass anyone. ‘What got you the job?’ I ask. ‘My experience,’ he quips.

My next role is in the basement menswear department. In the stockroom, between piles of Acne jeans, a team meeting is taking place. Two young men with long hair pulled into topknots sit on upturned crates and the rest cram in where they can. Everyone ‘pledges’ their sales for the week, like a game of contract whist. Ben (brown topknot): ‘Sixteen for the week and three today.’ Joe (blond topknot): ‘Twelve for the week and two today.’ It’s competitive down here, because the commission is good and the guys see their jobs in retail as for life, not just for Christmas. Menswear is one of the most coveted departments to work in at Liberty — staff get to wear their own dapper clothes, they are good-looking, confident and go out partying together outside work. Many are also members of the shop’s secretive 500 Club for those who bring in over £500,000 of sales per year for the store. They get taken out for dinner and last year had bespoke shirts made for them. Ben is talking me through what’s new for Dries Van Noten when Bill Nighy appears with his assistant and stylist. ‘Gotta go,’ says Ben, grabbing hangers of blue shirts.

‘Sometimes a buzz will go round if there’s a celeb in. Like, “Oh my God, it’s Usher,” ’ says denim specialist Vaidas, who wears Harold Bishop-style glasses and an Our Legacy blazer, adding that ‘Tinie Tempah also comes in a lot’. Vaidas believes in karma and gives out positive energy to his customers, which usually results in sales. He says different trouser brands need to be folded in different ways and we get to work on a pile of yellow Dockers.

Later, I sneak into the managers’ meeting in the Heritage Suite, a wood-panelled room with a great big brass chandelier on the third floor. Twenty-one authoritative types sit around a big oak table. Chief financial officer Paul Harris introduces proceedings and managers run through their department’s takings. I’m told not to write anything down, but I learn the store had a turnover of £80 million last year and footfall will be five million in 2013. People here seem far more stressed than their shopfloor colleagues. The pre-Christmas pressure is on. Meaningful looks are exchanged, eyebrows are raised. Chairman Marco Capello wafts in, exuding glamour and wealth. He is wearing an expensive Italian suit and looks like he’d be far more at home on a yacht off Capri. I understand nothing except that there is a concern none of the giant Christmas animals, including a £1,195 grizzly bear, have sold.

Jeans are not having a moment, Kurt Geiger is, and there’s been a good reaction to Victoria Beckham. Ed Burstell, the quirkily coiffed MD, wears a jaunty blue scarf in a nod to the winter season. He takes small sips from a can of Coke Zero and asks why things are the way they are. There’s an awkward silence.

Burstell was once described by a journalist as a ‘manbagged New Yorker who races through the store like an electrocuted schnauzer’. He has the cutting taped to his office wall alongside his other inspirations (Grumpy Cat, a zebra in a supermarket, a koala in a jumper). He is not looking forward to going to Croydon next week to take the UK citizenship test. ‘I know all the kings and queens,’ he tells me in his clipped, carefully put-together sentences. Burstell started working in his father’s locksmithery as a teenager but it wasn’t glamorous enough, so he got a job spraying fragrance at Macy’s. Some 20 years later he was senior vice president at upmarket New York department store Bergdorf Goodman. He’s worked forLiberty since 2008 and in that time has led the store’s double-digit year-on-year growth. I ask him what makes a Liberty person: ‘We like experience, but also ambition. Our people are open and friendly without being pushy. They are really, really knowledgeable but they keep it to themselves unless asked.’

There’s an hour before my break so I go to try my hand in haberdashery. Here I meet Trudy, who could be a younger Iris Apfel (the quintessential boho-chic glamorous grandma). I love her instantly. She wears glasses with coloured rims, piles of necklaces — one from a cooperative in Kenya (obviously) — and stacks of bangles. She’s worked in Rowan Yarns for six years. ‘Oh, I’ve seen all sorts — we’re in the centre of London,’ says Trudy. ‘Some people come here with problems that are nothing to do with their shopping. You’ve got to have a thick skin in retail.’ I help her wind some wool. No customers come, Trudy works on her own knitting project, and then it’s time for lunch.