What if a summer job was worth more than the paycheck?

Lisa Valencien
Jul 30, 2017 · 5 min read

My job as a temporary sales assistant at Lacoste helped me to shape what my next job in e-commerce for PepsiCo will be about

Lacoste’s sales team @LacosteParisTernes / 36 avenue desTernes, Paris 17e

On that 26th of May 2017, I received a phone call from PepsiCo’s HR telling me that I was hired for the job I really wanted and for which I had been through a 3-month competition. After the warm welcome into the Group, came the employment formalities to fill in and then, I learnt that I’ll start on the 4th of September. I remembered having mixed feelings about this starting date. On the one hand, I was very excited about it as I had finished my courses so it would be literally three months of pure vacation without any pressure at all. On the other hand, I knew that I didn’t have enough money to go on a road trip abroad for such a long time. This is the reason why I decided to find a summer job.

I have chosen to work in a fashion retail store because I wanted to experience what it is to be a sales assistant during the summer sales momentum. Besides, I also love fashion. I was very lucky to find a job at a Lacoste store to help for the rush of the summer sales. The beginning was a bit fastidious. I spent 3 full days in a not-climatized stock at the back of the store stapling price tag. But then, I left the stock for the front store and I realized this summer job was worth more than just cash. This experience was of gemlike value.

I’d like to focus on two lessons that I learnt from my practical experience that will probably be useful in my future job.


1. Lesson n°1: Facts are what matter the most

I can’t tell you how many time I’ve heard the word “data” this year… For instance, last June, Daniel Zhang, Alibaba’s CEO was explaining in a live interview at Vivatechnology summit in Paris that “data was more important than revenue” and that Alibaba has become a “data company”. In the same way, my next manager at PepsiCo told me during my interview concerning e-commerce:

“We need to innovate and so we need to test new online activations. But testing is not enough, we need to learn. Figures are what we are looking for. They are the reason why you will decide to scale up your initiatives or not”.

Working at Lacoste for one month ended up convincing me that data wasn’t just a buzzword. Every hour, we were in charge of collecting data such as the number of entry in the shop, the number of transactions, the number of articles bought by transaction, the total turnover and compiling it in a single view dashboard. Then, we were comparing it with figures of the same day last year. From the analysis of the sales ratio you could determine what your missions for the next hours would be. For example, if the sales conversion ratio was too low that means that the sales assistant team didn’t pay enough attention to the clients to make their visit in the shop useful. Thus, in the next hour we would need to focus on how we could help them and how we could make them aware about all the articles we have in store that they might have not noticed without any sales assistants intervention.

The same is true online. You need to track your metrics to see if your online activation is creating engagement and driving sales at every moment of the customer sales funnel. If you can’t measure something, you really have little chance of improving it.

Therefore, to be successful in retail business and e-commerce I know I’ll need to be metrics obsessed to know more things…

2. Lesson n°2: Be aware of new opportunities

Contrary to pure players such as Amazon, Cdiscount and many others, brands that are both sold in the store and online can offer more emotional experience. Indeed, consumers can see and touch the products before buying them. Thus, it is where the opportunity can be seized. Peter Drucker, Walmart’s CEO, would illustrate this by saying that it’s all about “winning at the intersection of digital and physical”. It also addresses the challenge of omnichannel management and how to gather all the information companies can collect about the new connected consumers.

Regarding my experience at Lacoste, I think I can transfer my skills in category management in the real world into the digital world but with a revised approach as the online market is played on a different board with different rules as the following:

  • Shelf Placement. In the real world, this is about optimizing the positioning of products given limited real estate. Online real estate is unlimited and search rankings are often based on consumer preferences.
  • Navigation. In the store, this is about banners and placement next to related categories. Online, the priority is making sure products get listed in the right departments with the right tags and that product reviews are highlighted.
  • Touch and Feel. Making consumers develop an emotional connection with a product on the shelf is a very different kind of challenge than creating a rich, virtual consumer experience, especially on a seven-inch smartphone screen.
  • Information. In a similar vein, printed posters, flyers, catalogues, and brochures are very different mediums of communication than digital devices.

I truly believe that partnering with retailers may be a success factor for the advertisers.


Eventually, these are the 2 greatest lessons I learnt during a one-month experience as a sales assistant and I am certain that these will be of a great help in my next work but also in my whole carrier. As well, I could have talked about all the soft skills I learnt as being exposed to a consumer can be sometimes very challenging… In this way, summer jobs really worth more than just a paycheck.

Lisa Valencien

Written by

Ready and motivated to exploit the strengths of digital for the development of a brand or an ambitious project! | Tech ambassador | @lisavalencien

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