2020 Our biggest challenge to date
It’s been far too long since our last blog post so I thought we’d write a piece on our experience of 2020 and how it affected Simply Jam.
Let’s go back to March 2020 and the pandemic hit and took the whole country by surprise, after all we have never experienced anything like this in our countries history to my knowledge.
We are in the full swing of planning our selling calendar for the year and booking venues at fares and festivals as usual which is a large portion of our yearly turnover and also this is where we meet new and old customers and they get to sample our Hot Pepper Jellies and we build our customer base, and Bam!!! Lockdown hits everyone, and all of the events are cancelled. At this point we like most of you are shell shocked and very apprehensive of our futures as we didn’t have any idea of how the COVID virus would affect the country so much. We were also left feeling very grateful that our family are and remain in good health.
So with our retail side of the business effectively closed down for the foreseeable future we are left to concentrate our effort on our Wholesale and Online business.
As many other online businesses we offered our loyal customer base additional savings on our Pepper Jellies for extended periods of time and we tried to think of different promotions to keep our customers engaged. This worked really well for us and we achieved record online sales for last year and we are incredibly grateful for the support shown from our customers far and wide. Our Hot Pepper Jellies have actually travelled thousands of miles across the United States to reach customers door steps. A big thank you once again to everyone who supported us and shared their love for our Pepper Jellies with friends and family.
Throughout last year we actually held pretty steady wholesaling to our stores throughout Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts which was amazing, we even added a few stores along the way and although we couldn’t do any sample demo’s in store we managed to sell a good amount of our Pepper Jellies.
We look forward business as usual at some point in the near future and we look forward to meeting new customer’s and introducing them to the delights of Simply Jam’s Hot Pepper Jellies.
Stay safe and be in good health.
