How the Passion Ignited

Six months after moving to Dover, I got a part time job at Victoria's Secret as an offset to all the testosterone that I was surrounded by at my full time job--the USAF.  It was great!  (It still is.)  I could talk about girl stuff to my heart's content.  I could test all kinds of beauty products to see what smells I liked and which I didn't.  And get paid to do so because I was "zoned" to that section when I first started.  We received training for bra fittings and then had to practice on our coworkers throughout the day because the company wanted to ensure that we knew what we were doing.  There were meetings held approximately once every quarter/season to introduce us to new products coming out and to expand our product knowledge on items that were already being sold.  The meetings also served as training opportunities to further our bra fit knowledge.

In time, there were fewer meetings.  We're talking over the course of a number of years since I'm going on year #9 in the same location.  So the training isn't as in-depth but it's still there and we're still encouraged to have the new employees fit their coworkers during the slow times of their shifts.

Even with all this training (or because of it), I was finding that I couldn't put ALL my customers into bras that VS sold.  They had too much breast tissue or their rib cages were absolutely tiny.  I say tiny because some were the size of my thigh.  lol.  So, I started looking for other options for them because I wanted to be able to help my customers find bras that fit them; though some just wanted VS bras.  In those cases, I would find the ones that we carried that best fit them and steer them towards 'em.  Other customers wanted ones that fit.  I suggested larger department stores in nearby states.  I suggested online locations.

I adopted the mindset like "the link economy" in Miracle on 34th Street: 

I wanted customers to know our VS location as a place that they could come to get good information, even if we didn't have their exact size, and it's something that I've employed ever since.  I like to think that customers come back because they know that we're there to help.