How Leamington businesses Willow, Regency Fish and Kwalee are adapting and changing in face of "time of worry" across country

Customers of Willow in Warwick Street had been asking for the business to set up an online shop for years but owner Karen Robison's hand was forced when she had to close her store in March due to Covid-19 lockdown restrictions.

She said: "While this has been a tumultuous time of worry, we aren’t going to take it lying down and have taken the opportunity with the doors closed, to provide our customers with a new way of accessing our much-loved products and range."

Karen, originally a designer by trade, opened Willow seven years ago.

The shop sells giftware, clothing, and interior design features among other products.

Visit willowleamington.co.uk

Meanwhile, Regency Fish in Regent Street has added new social distancing measures to its shop to keep customers and staff safe while its doors remain open and has found new ways to bring in fresh stock despite the effect Coronavirus has had on the industry.

Co-owner and director Darren Chapman said: "Since the pandemic began we made a promise to ourselves to keep going for as long as we could to support the community that has supported us for so long.

"We introduced social distancing by placing a chain across our front door and not allowing customers in the shop.

"We now take all orders at the door.

"We also started to only accept contactless payment as another hygiene measure. We have a 5 star hygiene rating so we hold ourselves to very high standards.

"Due to the pandemic our usual supply chain has been affected, so we have had to be proactive in basically creating a new one and finding new suppliers.

"We have managed to do so and have been collecting fresh stock weekly and sometimes daily from the fish market in Birmingham who are still able to source some of the freshest fish around from places like St Ives and Newlyn in Cornwall.

"We've also changed the way that we communicate with our customers.

"As people find themselves at home now more than ever we've been a lot more active on social media, updating our Facebook page daily so that customers can see what they want before they come to the shop.

"The response and support has been phenomenal and we would like to say a massive thank you to the good people of Leamington."

Click here for the @RegencyFish Facebook page.

Kwalee, a leading developer and publisher of hyper-casual mobile games, has made several of its vacancies for key roles open to remote-working applicants as a direct consequence of lessons learned during the COVID-19 lockdown.

The Leamington-based company, which currently employs more than 75 staff and has grown significantly over the past year, had never previously considered hiring employees on a remote basis. However, following the achievements made by team members while working from home under lockdown and the company’s smooth transition to a remote workforce, many roles will now come with the option to work from home.

Currently, Kwalee has 14 vacancies open with the possibility of remote work, with an eye to offering more in the future.

The following positions are the first to be opened to either those able to work at Kwalee’s HQ based on the site of Ricardo in Southam Road , or anyone looking to join the team remotely, with applications considered on case by case basis for the roles of hypercasual game designer, game programmer, full-stack engineer /server programmer, publishing manager and publishing executive.

Veronica Minano, talent acquisition manager at Kwalee, said: “It’s hard to find positives in this pandemic, but for us, one is that the temporary change in where we’re all working has been the learning we needed to show us that we can indeed work with this larger talent pool and that remote work is possible for us.

"It's really exciting that we’ve now found a way to welcome more people to our team, while maintaining everything we’ve built in Leamington.”

Kwalee CEO David Darling added: “The COVID-19 pandemic challenged many fundamental aspects of how we work, since we’re a creative company and communicative collaboration is key.

"Despite this, we’ve adapted so well - culminating in the successful launch of Bake It while all working from home - that we now see potential to take these lessons forward and embrace remote working in the longer term.

To find out more about all current vacancies at Kwalee visit https://kwalee.com/join-us/