Thanks for this opportunity to share our story in hopes of helping and inspiring new business owners. My name is Jasmine Dixon and I am the Owner and Chief Stylist at Slay Couture. SLAY Couture is a high-end occasion-wear online boutique offering the most sophisticated,  unique and chic looks for women! We’ve been around since 2017 and like most newer fashion retail e-commerce businesses during the pandemic, we encountered some challenges in the first half of 2020. The following covers a few of the major challenges born by the pandemic and how we were able to navigate in order to stay in business.

The immediate shock of the pandemic haulted sales for many companies during the mid to latter half of 2020. This was totally expected as the pandemic brought economic hardships for most Americans with job layoffs and other labor reductions which hurt many small and large businesses. We were no different, the uncertainties of the pandemic limited consumer spending with us. We are grateful that the US government stepped in to provide some relief for our small business among others through the Cares Act. Fortunately, our company was able to leverage the SBA Covid-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL) which provided monetary support that we elected to re-invest into our business to evolve our business model. Here’s what we did:

1. We diversified and rebranded our products and service offerings.

Pre-pandemic, Slay Couture was focused on selling women’s occasion wear which became problematic because people were no longer attending events and most were safely quarantined in their homes. We were able to leverage the Covid-19 EIDL to re-focus our product offerings to accommodate this drastic change. As a result, we invested and started selling Athleisure wear and other items that could be worn in the comfort of being home or “around the house”.

Also, before the pandemic we were mainly focused on online selling. As the pandemic came underway we begin to diversify and growing our services by rebranding our personal styling services and adding a personal shopping offering.

The diversification of products and services gave our clientele more options while it provided us the opportunity to sell and capture more revenue streams.

2. We shifted from an inventory investment model to drop-shipping.

As it relates to our diversification of products, although we made an investment in new inventory to accommodate the new norm of quarantine we found it hard to anticipate the needs and wants of our clientele which resulted in random pieces of unsold inventory. As a result, we started to limit our inventory on hand and move to a drop-shipping model. Many in retail understand dropshipping buy for those who may not, drop shipping is a retail fulfillment method where the business doesn’t keep the products it sells in stock. In this method, we purchase items directly from a third party who in turns offers to ship items directly to our customers..

The drop-shipping model allowed us to offer more product selections without making a huge monetary investment up front.

3. We leveraged the rise of customer engagement through social media.

With consumers forced to quarantine, they had a lot of time on their hands to browse the web. Particularly, the rise in apps like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok provided businesses a different way to engage old and potential customers making it easier to promote products and services without leaving those platforms. We took advantage of this by leveraging these platforms to market our products and services to audiences we may have not otherwise reached. Our clientele nearly tripled by investing time and advertising on these social media platforms.

While the pandemic brought on many economic hardships for businesses it also created new opportunities for business expansion. The details in this article provide some insight into the evolution of our business model during the pandemic.