It’s been a while since we profiled your brand reps – aka business development managers and executives etc. to give them a couple of their official titles.
Some might say it’s been too long. So here’s the second of our ten (we’ll post one a day), and we enjoyed catching up with them so much and there are so many of you doing a similarly grand job, we’re going to feature reps every month. Get in touch if you want to be included.
Rosie Milne
Business Development Manager
Eden Mill
Glasgow and Edinburgh
Rosie is celebrating five years at Eden Mill – one year for every gin in the core range she looks after as well as their experimental and liqueur range. Not bad for someone that started out doing a Christmas temping admin job.
She explains, “As well as temping I was packaging bits and bobs, and what seemed like all of a sudden they created a permanent role for me and kept me on.
“Then a brand ambassador role came up in Edinburgh and as I’m originally from Fife, I’d worked in hospitality there so I thought why not. I did that role for two years before moving to Glasgow (I longed to live on the west coast) and took this job, would you believe three days before the first lockdown hit.”
But this twenty-nine-year-old adapted like the rest of us.
“It’s been challenging and introducing yourself via email, which I’m still having to do in Glasgow, is not the same. You can’t cold call either obviously and wearing masks takes away so many skills you use to build relationships and trust with your customers. Luckily I brought my east coast accounts with me so that has made things easier as the restrictions have started to ease.”
She trained to be an actor at Edinburgh Napier and despite her life going in a different direction, it came in handy for her brand rep career.
“We do a few activations and tastings and events and I love hosting events and my drama training gave me an excellent grounding for this as well as the confidence to stand up and speak to people – and learning about products and retaining all the info. It’s a lot like learning lines! I used to have ambitions to be an actor but now comfortable with hospitality.”
A self-confessed people person, she’s made ‘best friends for life’ doing this job and loves the variety of high-end businesses to ‘old man’s boozers’. She also likes the sales side. “I am driven by targets. You have to be in this job, but I get the same amount of job satisfaction from building relationships too.”
