Chapter 25
When Lotta got back to London, the Snug campaign was all-encompassing.
With the Oslo part ready to go, Clemmie wanted to get the rest of the stores underway with their own searches for collaboration partners.
As part of that, Lotta had prepared a presentation that she would make at an online meeting of all the Snug store managers.
Mats was due to arrive the following day, and Lotta was looking forward to getting the presentation out of the way so she could enjoy his visit without having work in the back of her mind.
They needed to connect properly. The last time they’d seen each other, two weeks ago, they’d spent the day on the island doubling the size of the cabin.
She’d loved it. And it had been just what she’d needed to bring her focus back to the here and now.
She loved Mats; she loved being with him, even when it was on an island in the middle of a foggy fjord, covered in dust and being drizzled on.
She wanted to do this. And maybe it was okay that they weren’t together all the time because when they were, it was amazing.
That feeling had carried her through the past two weeks.
That and the insane amount of work it had taken to get to this point.
She sat in the meeting room at the Snug offices with her laptop in front of her, well aware that behind her, on the big screen, were around forty store managers waiting to hear from her.
‘I think we’re ready to start,’ said Harry, who was in charge of the IT side of things today.
‘Good morning from London!’ Clemmie began.
‘Thank you for taking time out of your day to join us for what we hope will be an exciting new chapter in Snug’s journey.
As you know, we’ve been working with Snug Oslo on a new collaboration initiative, and today we’re joined by Lotta Jansen, the genius behind it, to explain how you can implement it in your own stores. Lotta.’
Lotta took a deep breath and smiled her widest smile, even though her heart was beating nineteen to the dozen.
She looked straight into the camera and introduced herself.
As she spoke, emojis began to fly up the screen, hearts and handclaps that ridiculously put her at ease so that by the time she pulled up her presentation and began telling the story of the Oslo collaboration, she felt as if she were talking to a room of friends.
‘We’ve put together a pack for each of you which has every step we followed to get to where we are now with Snug Oslo.
It also has templates you can customise for your own social media channels and once we have all the information from you about your collaborations we will use those to launch an overarching campaign for the Snug brand as a whole. Does anyone have any questions?’
Harry fielded questions for her that spanned everything from stores that were concerned they didn’t have their own social media accounts to stores that were worried about alienating their makers by having to choose a favourite.
Many of the questions were answered by Clemmie but Lotta found herself offering to run another session for the handful of stores that had no social media presence of their own and wanted to set some up before they started on the campaign work.
By the end of the meeting, Lotta was exhausted but felt it had gone well.
‘Thanks so much,’ said Clemmie. ‘That couldn’t have gone better.’
‘No problem. I’m glad they all seemed excited about it.’
‘To be honest, that’s exactly what I thought would happen. Unfortunately the Oslo store was a bit of an outlier on that front, but we knew that would be the case.’ She looked a little sheepish when she admitted that, but it was only confirming what Lotta had already guessed. No surprise.
‘Well it’s all worked out in the end. Oda is going to be amazing.’
‘Look, do you mind coming back in half an hour or so? We need to have a quick wrap up meeting about this but I have something else I need to talk to you about.’
‘Sure, no problem.’
While she waited, Lotta went to a nearby coffee shop and treated herself to a piece of lemon drizzle cake to celebrate.
It felt like that call had been the culmination of all the work she’d done on the campaign so far.
From now on, she was going to be taking more of an advisory role as well as keeping oversight of the content that stores were producing.
After weeks and weeks of hard work, she finally felt like she could take a breath.
She scrolled through her emails, deleting the spam and filing stuff away, when a new message popped into the top of her inbox.
From what Lotta could make out, it was from the Norwegian equivalent of Visit Britain, what used to be known as the tourist board.
They had heard about the Snug Oslo collaboration campaign from the Folk Museum and via the Oslo trade association, which was probably Hanne’s husband.
They wanted to talk to Lotta about running a campaign to highlight heritage crafts as part of a new tourism strategy.
It was starting. This was what she’d hoped would happen because of winning the Snug account, but she’d never imagined it would come from another country or before the Snug campaign had even launched.
It was good old-fashioned word of mouth, and even in the digital world, that was what the best businesses were built on.
She headed back to Snug HQ with a spring in her step. The email from Norway had made her day, whether or not it came to anything. Until she replied, she wouldn’t know how it would work out, so until then she’d take it as a win.
Harry was back at the reception desk when she went in, and he smiled broadly at her. ‘Go straight through. Clemmie’s in the meeting room.’
Clemmie was by herself. ‘Lotta, thanks so much for waiting. We’ve already had some very positive feedback from the store managers about your presentation. It couldn’t have gone better.’
‘That’s great.’
‘Working with you has made us realise that we’re lacking any internal expertise in social media.
What I don’t want is to gain a ton of traction through this campaign only to have it fizzle out afterwards.
We need to see this as an opportunity to grow our visibility on the socials and we’d like you to help. ’
Lotta didn’t say anything. She was buzzing inside. This could be a game-changer for her and she didn’t want to say the wrong thing.
‘So, would you be interested in a long-term contract working a few hours a week on managing our social media? We’d like you to build prompts and templates for the stores, keep an eye on the stats, do regular audits, that kind of thing.’
‘You’re talking about hiring me on retainer?’
‘Exactly.’
Clemmie’s air of confidence wavered as she waited for Lotta’s response. The pressure to answer was immense, but Lotta held her nerve.
‘Would you mind putting that in an email? I’ll need to see what scope we have to accommodate an ongoing arrangement before I can commit.’
‘Oh, yes. Of course. I’ll send something over this morning. We love what you’ve done, Lotta, and we don’t want to lose your expertise.’
Wasn’t it funny, Lotta thought as she walked back to the station in the warm spring sunshine, how life could change so quickly?
One thing, winning the Snug contract, that was all it had taken, and now, off the back of that, she potentially had a new client and was on a retainer, something she would never have dreamed could happen a few months ago.
It had been hard work to get here, but perhaps now she had broken through and could enjoy some success with her business on a secure footing for the first time in years. It felt too good to be true.
Back at her flat, she made a cup of tea and sat at her desk. Opening her laptop, knowing that the Norwegian email was there, waiting to be answered and probably one from Clemmie, felt like a landmark moment.
‘Oh my god,’ Lotta said, clamping her hand over her mouth when she saw the offer from Snug.
It was a ridiculous amount of money for something she could do in her sleep.
They didn’t even want a campaign for that; it was just a glorified social media manager, something she could fit around anything else she was doing.
It would pay the bills even if she had no other work.
She couldn’t reply yet. It was too soon. She’d already gone against every fibre of her being in not biting Clemmie’s hand off earlier at the office, and she didn’t want to appear too thirsty now either.
After replying to the Norwegian email, saying that she’d love to work with them and proposing an online meeting for the following week, she made herself some lunch and called Mats.
They’d hardly spoken over the past two weeks, and Lotta had been grateful for the space to concentrate on her work.
She missed him, of course she did, and she couldn’t wait to see him tomorrow.
‘Hei, min kjaere,’ Mats said.
She could hear the smile in his voice, and her heart melted a little.
‘Hey. What are you up to?’
‘I’m on the island. I’ve brought some stuff over from my apartment.’ He’d started packing up his place in Oslo and was gradually moving everything to Bergen. Fredrik was back and forth between the two cities and was proving a useful removals man since Mats didn’t own a car.
‘What kind of stuff?’ Anything that had been in his apartment would look out of place on the island.
‘Oh, you know, the sofa, coffee table, TV, that kind of thing.’
She laughed. ‘Okay. But really.’
‘You’ll have to wait and see.’
‘You’re still coming tomorrow?’
He harrumphed. ‘Of course. I can’t wait to see you.’
‘Me too.’ She thought about sharing her news, but it felt that if she told anyone, maybe the bubble would burst, it would be jinxed, so she kept it to herself. ‘See you at Heathrow.’
‘I’m happy to get an Uber or something.’
‘Absolutely not! I’m looking forward to the whole airport reunion.’
‘So am I, Lotta. I love you.’
‘I love you, too.’ She hung up, feeling bad for not sharing her excitement but somehow still feeling she’d done the right thing by not.
If Mats thought she had the Norway job, or that she had regular hours with Snug, both of those things lent themselves to the possibility of her moving to Norway and she needed time to think about what she wanted before they discussed anything like that again.
Her resistance to the idea was waning with every trip she took there.
She loved Oslo and Bergen, and she could imagine herself living there.
If Mats had been staying in Oslo, maybe it would have been an easier decision.
Fitting into his life there would have been easier; the city was where the work was, where the good internet was, and where there was a version of Mats who fitted with the life she was building for herself.
She loved all the versions of Mats, but there was no getting away from the fact that life on the island was a stark contrast to Oslo.
The idea of a life without Mats was beginning to seem impossible.
It was hard to reconcile the new version of her life and her flourishing career with the woman who had fallen in love with him.
The woman who wanted to commit to a person and to her job.
And the confidence she was finding through her recent success was helping her to believe that perhaps she could be the woman who had it all.
There was already an email waiting for her from the Norwegian tourist board with a link to an online meeting on Tuesday and more detail about what they were after.
That meant preparing a pitch, and if Mats was here, it was going to be hard to fit that in but it had to be her priority.
All of these opportunities were going to take her closer to her goal of building a successful agency and perhaps ultimately could bring her the security she needed to feel ready to make a move to Norway, if that’s what she decided.
After she emailed Clemmie accepting the freelance contract, she settled down to work.