4:27 pm, May 30, 2018
LEADING car supermarket group CarShop celebrated uniting as individuals at the Birmingham Pride Parade.
Colleagues from across the award-winning car retailer – which is part of the Sytner Group’s car supermarket division and has stores in Northampton, Cardiff, Swindon Doncaster and Norwich – quickly offered up their spare time to take part in Birmingham Pride.
With 20 people signing up almost immediately and with their guests invited too, they made up a cavalry of 32 in last Saturday’s parade, which CarShop said gave it the perfect opportunity to live true to its purpose of ‘leading the evolution of the car marketplace’.
People director Fiona Cottle said: ‘By encouraging CarShop’s values and behaviours, we are driving a more open, transparent and inclusive culture where determination, trustworthiness and collaboration are encouraged and celebrated.’
All of the marchers sported custom-made T-shirts designed in-house that showed phrases under road signs and other motoring-themed imagery, including ‘Driving Diversity’, ‘Shifting Stereotypes’ and ‘Mirror, Signal, And Be Fabulous’ – phrases all fully supported by the organisers of Pride.
And since they were representing CarShop, there was no float but two vibrant vehicles straight from the supermarket’s stock list. A Fiat 500 and Volkwagen Tiguan had a wrap designed in-house and combined all the elements of the Pride flag as well as the CarShop logo, making the team stand out from the crowd.
The 45-minute parade through the streets of Birmingham was the biggest one to date, with 130 groups this year compared with 105 in 2017, 4,000 people and 40 vehicles.
Content and communications manager Ben Scholes said: ‘We’ve had such a good day at Pride. The atmosphere and the people have been fantastic, and it’s really great that we’ve been able to support our colleagues and communities this way.’
Cottle added: ‘At CarShop we are committed to being an inclusive environment where everyone belongs, because it reflects our core values and also because it makes good business sense. We know that making our workforce more representative of our customer and community base will help to achieve our mission to deliver a world-class colleague and customer experience.’
Pictured from left are brand experience manager Andrew Smith, content and communications manager Ben Scholes, partner marketing manager Natasha Holland, guest Sarah Thompson and business manager Leon Dutton
MORE: CarShop smashes £100,000 charity target
MORE: CarShop Executive Team raises £12,000 for charity on Mighty Wolf Run
MORE: CarShop appoints new people director
On WorkshopMagazine.co.uk: Edd China to build new restoration show – with a little help from his friends
