From the Desk of ... Sasha!

[While Jenette is on sabbatical, her column will be guest-written by other key members of the organization.]

I’ve been fortunate to be a part of Jenette Bras’ growth over the last nine years both as the opening manager of our West LA location and now as our Head of People. While so much has changed since my early days with the company, a continuous focus of ours has been to keep our defining culture intact. As you can imagine, this came naturally when we had only two stores in Los Angeles sharing one team and has become much more intentional as we became five stores across two states.

One of my most exciting responsibilities is building a dynamic team that is culturally consistent across all our locations. Training and development is the area of my position that I really geek out about (sorry benefits, ya boring!) and I spend a lot of my time and effort mentoring our managers and working alongside each of our employees.  As I write this, I’m working out of our Buckhead store in Atlanta to help provide coverage, audit safety operations, and train our newest Atlanta Bra Fitter, Clara.While our individual locations are sisters, not twins (or I guess in this case quintuplets), my perspective as our resident ‘people person’ is that you can count on authenticity from each and every one of our Bra Fitters. Through all their individuality, you’ll experience what’s most important to us as a company: expertise, quality, straight talk, humor, and kindness.

You won’t have to worry about navigating any pretension when you walk through any of our doors. Qualities that I look for when hiring are kindness, honesty, flexibility, the willingness to step back to listen and receive feedback, and the ability to bring lightness and humor into difficult situations. While most of our fitters weren’t hired with previous bra fitting knowledge, what sets them apart is that they meet people where they are and realize excellent service is different for each person. Most of our training is done through good old-fashioned on-the-floor training. We practice fittings on each other, then have our new fitters shadow senior fitters, and finally, our new fitters take over and seasoned fitters shadow to provide feedback and check fit. The goal is to see as many different bodies as possible in each style while practicing product knowledge and learning how to navigate conversations about changing bodies and self-image.As a companion tool, we’ve also created an extensive training program in our company ‘wiki’ which has cut down our training timeline by about 50%. Here’s a snapshot of our training topics – if you are interested!

I’m so incredibly proud to have hired and overseen training for all our current Fitters and Store Managers. We’ve built a fantastic team and we wouldn’t be where we are without them!xoxo,Sasha