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What do you do when your business is 90% wholesale, selling to Museum Shop Stores, Brick & Mortar Gift Shops, Boutiques, Book Stores, etc. and they all CLOSE INDEFINITELY due to a global health crisis!?! Well for starters, no matter how grounded a person you are, you panic. How will we pay our employees, how will we pay our bills, can/should we ship product during a pandemic? On top of all this, we of course are worried about our health and that of our employees, friends, family and the nation and world in general.
Well lucky for us, we had already developed a relationship with the ABC Good Morning America family of TV shows) in early 2019. It resulted in us partnering with them on some flash sales in 2019 on Good Morning America, The View and Strahan & Sara (all a part of the ABC GMA morning lineup) which were very successful.
Prior to the COVID19 Pandemic hitting, we had already committed to participate in an April 2020 Earth Day month long sale with Good Morning America. Because the sale was a month long, we were actually hesitant to participate, we didn’t want to upset our wholesale customers with a full month-long discount off the retail price, but we took a chance. And boy did it pay off, as we had no idea at the time that every single one of our Wholesale customers would be shutting down as mandated by their states and local governments. It turned out to be a life saver for us and our April sales number was actually up over April 2019!
So now April is over and what next, everything is still closed! So, we started trying to focus and promote our direct to consumer e-commerce more. Little did we know the great surprise that would greet us in June that would help give this goal a huge boost. On a Saturday afternoon we got an e-mail from the ABC Deals people asking if we were able to come up with a deal to air that Wednesday. In the past we spent up to a month or more preparing for these deals. We would make sure we had sufficient inventory, decide which items to offer, build them all out in advance of the sale. However, in this case, it’s Saturday, and they are asking if we can be ready Wednesday…we said YES! This was a bold undertaking but how could we turn it down given the current business situation? Monday morning rolls around, I open my e-mail, and now the sale is moved to Tuesday and they need all of our assets/images, inventory #’s and a million other things by noon that day…. on top of that they wanted video that we didn’t have/had not made. This was to be a really special deal too, featuring business that were struggling due to COVID19 due to the customer base being wholesale. Well long story short we got everything completed in the very short time frame on Monday and the deal website was live by 6 am Wednesday, it aired around 9, and by the afternoon we had pretty much sold out of our entire inventory! WOW WOW WOW!! The response was overwhelming, we never expected anything this big, we were unprepared, and now we have 8 people, trying to print, process, and pack 18,000 individual orders in a 3 to 5-day time span. On top of that, we did not have time to prebuild our luminaries for the sale, so we had thousands of sets of Luminaries to build. We put in 11- and 12-hour days including weekends and somehow, we did it. And that is the story of how Modgy has survived and even thrived to this point during this very tough economic time. It’s not over yet though, we’re going to keep on riding things out and hope to see everyone healthy and happy on the other side.
Oh yea, you can catch us again on ABC in early August on Live with Kelly and Ryan More details on the date and time as we get closer to the August sale date.