Beauly business sees huge rise in online sales during coronavirus lockdown
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A gift and clothing shop in Beauly has pulled out all the stops to ensure it keeps trading safely during the pandemic.
When lockdown started The Old School Beauly had a website featuring about 3000 products but, in the weeks since, that has grown to more than 5000.
It has resulted in the shop seeing an uplift in online sales of more than 500 per cent.
Owners Helen and William Crawford say the massive undertaking has ensured their business will be able to reopen from a position of strength.
They also started a click and collect service for local customers.
“Like many local businesses, we furloughed our staff but there was still a duty upon us, as the owners, to ensure we came out of this in a position of strength,” Mr Crawford said.
“In the first week of lockdown we made minimal sales because everyone was basically in a state of shock. I knew our staff were safe at home so I just got my head down and went to work on the website, uploading more and more products.
“Since then our website sales have gone through the roof with a 552 per cent uplift over the last 30 days in comparison with the same period last year.”
Orders have come from local customers as well as people in America, Denmark, Germany and France.
Mrs Crawford said they thought about what was relevant right now.
“After the initial shock, we saw that there was still a strong demand for gifting – after all, we are still celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, new babies and the like,” she explained. “People have an overwhelming urge to reach out and send a token of love and we knew we could do that for them safely.
“We also saw a strong demand for books and stationery, casual clothes and sneakers, for wellbeing products and for good, educational games for children.”
The couple is now looking at how they can reopen safely but they are – perhaps surprisingly – not in a rush to do so.
“For us the priority is that we put in place the highest possible standard for our customers and our staff and that this shop is as safe as it can be,” Mr Crawford said.
“We want our customers to shop in the knowledge that we care about them and we want our staff to feel confident and safe when they return to work.
“When we reopen our shop, we anticipate that our website will play a much more prominent role in how we continue to trade. We also anticipate our click and collect service will be used as a matter of course so we need to plan our resources to support that.
“Times have changed and we need to adapt.”
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