Deputy helps Wildash London spend time on what really matters

Wildash London are a luxury soft-furnishings and home accessories brand based in London’s iconic Notting Hill. They’re on a mission to fill stylish homes around the world with sustainable, design-led products that are built to last. “It’s probably not the best business model,” laughed Nisa Berzeg, Managing Director, “it’s about creating an understanding of the importance of products that are more than just throw-aways.”

With an emphasis on accountability at the heart of everything they do, Wildash are passionate about educating their customers on the joys of traceable, ethical, and environmentally conscious products. And everything that Wildash sells is fairly traded, which brings economic empowerment to communities around the world.

As a relatively new business, the team at Wildash has been working hard to establish themselves in a competitive market. That means taking the brand on the road to trade shows, festivals, and exhibitions, which in turn means hiring lots of temporary staff. “As you can probably imagine, it’s been quite challenging to find people and to allocate positions”, says Nisa, “ And it gets more complicated around summer and Christmas time”.

Wildash’s biggest challenge is trying to organise their team of casual hours employees, who work at events and trade shows based across multiple locations. Before they started using Deputy, this task was almost impossible. “Organising staffing was all pretty vague”, says Nisa. Wildash were mainly relying on spreadsheets or paper calendars internally, and using email over the weekend to try to sort out staffing for the next week: emails that were easily missed.

“With a lack of a cohesive scheduling system, it’s less about the actual time that’s spent allocating shifts, and more about the time that’s wasted when people call to clarify times and tasks,” explained Nisa, “Those little interruptions really add up to create a massive disturbance across the whole day.”

Finding her time drained by these near constant interruptions of focus, Nisa knew it was time to make a change. “It got to a point where it just wasn’t viable anymore”. When they started looking around for a solution, Wildash chose Deputy, and they haven’t looked back. “It’s been a huge shift in efficiency”.

Wildash looked around at a few different solutions, but it soon became clear that Deputy was the best fit for their business. “I liked the simple interface and the visual layout of the whole thing. It’s very easy to use. You can see everything right in front of you.”

Now Nisa can assign people quickly and efficiently to various locations, and everyone knows what to do when they get there, because tasks are clearly laid out on the Deputy app. People can simply log in and see what they’re meant to be doing, leaving Nisa in peace to get on with her own tasks.

One of the hardest things about managing temporary staff is that they’re often all in different locations, working irregular shifts, without a regular salary. “Deputy’s timetabling feature allows us to keep on top of it”, says Nisa. Deputy’s multiple locations feature gives Wildash a real insight into where their staff are, how many hours they’re working, and what they’re earning, allowing them to manage staff costs – one of the biggest strains on small businesses.

Deputy’s notifications options mean that Wildash don’t have to depend on casual staff checking their emails. Now staff get a push notification from the app, so Wildash can always contact them when they need to.

Now that they’ve streamlined their staffing processes, Wildash have more time to spend on growing their new business and developing their marketing strategy. All thanks to Deputy.