The businesses that have had a boost during the pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic has not been bad news for all businesses. Laura Clements speaks to some who have been very busy since the lockdown started
FOR many businesses the coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating effect with staff furloughed, shop fronts shuttered and customers simply disappearing overnight as they were told to stay at home.
But for some, coronavirus has presented a unique set of circumstances which means they have never been so busy.
Glorious weather, coupled with summer holiday funds sitting idle, has meant an unprecedented boom in people spending money on their gardens. Gardeners and hot tub companies have reaped the rewards.
The cycling industry took off after Boris said it was the best way to get your allocated exercise and now you can’t buy a new bike until September.
These are some of the businesses in Wales working overtime to keep up with demand.
THE SIGN-MAKERS
Simon James is owner of Elite Signs and Graphics Ltd, a family-run sign company based in Bridgend. He is more used to sitting down with clients to discuss designs for company vehicles.
Now he is designing bespoke social distancing signs over Zoom for shops and businesses looking to keep their customers safe as they reopen. Demand for clear plastic protective screens is also high.
The demand has rocketed as lockdown begins to ease and is only set to increase, says Simon. There is already a worldwide shortage of perspex, he says.
“Perspex is difficult and each day the price is going up,” said Simon. “It comes from all over the world – Portugal and Turkey. There is a worldwide shortage. I’ve got contacts in America and it’s just crazy. You can’t get it quick enough. People will want to get going as soon as the UK is open for business, but it’s impossible if you haven’t got the screens up.”
He is busy making perspex screens for individual desks in offices which “look the part”. The key is to make them part of the furniture and not look like a Covid intervention, he said.
“They wouldn’t look out of place if social distancing disappeared,” he said. “They could just be for privacy.”
Part of the challenge has been adapting the products he already had specifically for social distancing. When lockdown happened, he had just completed work for the new Fablas ice cream parlour in Porthcawl. He had already done the signs for their exterior but they never got to open as planned. Now, they want to reopen and they’ve turned their thoughts to the signs they need to keep their customers safe.
“They wanted it to be kid-friendly,” said Simon. “They wanted an onbrand ice-cream splash, they didn’t want red and the scary alert word. They wanted it to be friendly while still giving the core message.
“So we went with ice cream drops on the floor. It’s a bit more fun and a different take on it.”
Few people realise any stickers on the floor have to meet safety standards, so it’s been a case of educating people too.
Simon realised he could adapt the business, which was set up by his father Clive James in 1996, after he was contacted by a nurse at the Princess of Wales hospital in Bridgend. The PPE they were wearing made it impossible for patients to know whether they were talking to a nurse or a cleaner, he said. So Simon came up with the idea of printed stickers so staff could write their names and identify themselves. The hospital took 5,000 stickers, before three more Welsh hospitals got in touch. He ended up printing another 15,000 for the Royal Glamorgan, Morriston and Prince Charles hospitals.
“I would come into the workshop and print off these labels, so it was crazy,” Simon said, who works alongside his sister too.
He has two daughters, aged nine and 11, who watch TV and point out characters not observing social distancing.
“They know already,” he said. “It’s a crazy world.”
He believes that social distancing is here to stay for a while though and his next challenge is working with hairdressers.
“I’m trying to come to a possible solution about how they can work,” he added. “You’ve got to understand their business, you can’t just use what works for one.”
THE BIKE SHOP
In Whitchurch, Cardiff, Damian Harris has never been so busy. He owns Damian Harris Cycles, which has been in business on the high street for more than 60 years.
“Busy? That’s not the word,” Damian said. “We’ve been doing 16-hour days for 15 weeks now.”
Keeping up with demand has been almost impossible and has not been without its low points.
“We’re trying to do our utmost best, but we’ve even been physically abused and it’s been a nightmare, I just want it over with now to be honest,” he said.
“We’ve never been in this predicament ever, no one has, and people are used to getting everything straight away. But because of the sheer demand, people are having to wait six or 10 weeks for bikes.”
The problem extends right down the supply chain, he says, with the factory in Germany where many of his bikes are produced working at a significantly reduced capacity. The factory usually has 265 workers, but due to coronavirus, there’s 18 people there currently.
“We’re all trying to get bikes out the door to people. We usually sell 10 to 15 bikes each day. We’re selling hundreds a week now so it’s mad. It’s gone crazy.
“I thought it would have quietened down by now because there are no bikes left in the world to sell. People’s price points started off at £400, but they can’t get that now, so they’re spending £4,000.
“People are buying them and I’ve never seen anything like this in all my years in the business.”
He puts the surge in interest down to a reluctance from people to use public transport, even as lockdown restrictions are eased. That, and the advocation of bikes as a suitable form of exercise in lockdown’s early days, said Damian.
“Boris said the best thing you can do is get on a bike and ever since, every man and his dog wants to buy a bike,” Damian mused.
But the sudden popularity of bikes does now mean the NHS staff who usually have a four-week window to buy a bike on the bike-to-work scheme can no longer get one.
It saddens Damian, who said: “They can’t get any and they won’t get any for a good few months. On average, we’re losing at least 30 bike sales each day because we can’t supply them to customers.
“It’s hard, but we just can’t get anything. I’m in talks with Spain, Italy, Germany but the knock-on effect is everyone is pre-ordering 2021 stock, which will hopefully come in in September. But the thing is that’s already sold.”
It’s not just new bike sales either, his workshop is “rammed” with repair work too, Damian added. So much so that he has actually taken on more staff during the pandemic, and no one has been furloughed.
“The workshop is beyond,” he said. “I’ve employed more staff and I’ve got them working outside. We have a massive area out the back where we’re building and repairing bikes.”
He thinks there is a great future ahead for cycling and the industry. “I feel cycling is going to be huge,” he said. “More and more people are going to be cycling after lockdown.
“It’s been so nice to see people cycling with their families and we’ve never seen that before. I’ve never seen anything like it with so many cyclists on the road but now the gov
ernment need to come up with something to make it safe.”
THE HOT TUB COMPANY
With summer holidays cancelled and several months of wall-to-wall sunshine stuck in lockdown, people have decided to bring their holiday luxuries into their own back gardens.
Demand for hot tubs has soared and for Yan Coob, the director at Pembrokeshire-based Castle Hot Tubs, lockdown has been his busiest period in living memory.
Yan, who is a director at the family-run business, says they have already met their sales target for the whole of 2020 plus an extra 20%. They’ve even recruited extra staff at their base in Hayscastle, as well as their showrooms in Pyle and Swansea.
“It’s gone crazy for hot tubs,” said Yan.
“It’s been great for the business.” But it does mean there’s a growing shortage of hot tubs in the world and the acrylic that is used to make them is getting hard to get hold of.
So far, Yan says his suppliers have kept up with the demand, although one of his Canadian manufacturers has had an outbreak of Covid-19 in the factory, which put them in shutdown for a couple of weeks.
“That’s not helping but we work with three other suppliers,” Yan said.
The family business, which was started in 2002 by Yan’s parents, imports its hot tubs into the UK on shipping containers. At the start of lockdown, they had 100 in stock. All of those have now gone.
“People are splashing their cash on a hot tub instead of their annual summer holiday,” Yan explained. “We’re hearing people aren’t able to go on holiday this year, or don’t really want to travel, so are buying a hot tub instead.
“They’re coming in and putting it on finance to spread the cost over three to five years. We want to keep getting the tubs in and out as quickly as possible so I’m bringing in extra people to help with that.”
The surge in demand means anyone wanting to buy a hot tub this summer is looking at September before they can be delivered, added Yan.
THE LANDSCAPE GARDENERS
Paul Melvin is one half of a two-man team who run Al Fresco landscaping.
The 52-year-old is a landscape gardener and said he and business partner Richard Jones were flat out with jobs. Their work schedule is booked out until at least September.
Paul said: “People have got the predicament of no holiday this year and with an extra £2,000 in their pocket, they’re saying, ‘Let’s do the garden’. We’ve had a lot of that and we’re absolutely rammed.”
The pair did furlough some staff for a few weeks during the first part of lockdown, but only because the building merchants were shut. “We didn’t continue, although the demand was there and the phone was ringing constantly,” Paul added.
They’ve been back to work for three weeks now.
“It’s as busy as ever and people have got time to spend on the computer and look for ideas,” he explained. “The weather has been great, so people have thought let’s put our money to good use and enjoy what we can, which is the garden.
“When there was a rumour that we were going into lockdown back in the middle of March, I had a lady ring me up and she even popped round the house. She said: ‘If we go into lockdown, I want a patio. If I’m going to be forced to stay at home, I want something nice to sit in’.”
People have realised that coronavirus isn’t just “a flash in the pan”, Paul said, and they were more patient as a result.
“People are quite happy to have an initial consultation and then wait to have the work done in autumn, maybe even winter,” he said.
Jamie Bloomfield, the director at Eden Landscapes Ltd, has noticed a lot more people interested in buying garden sheds. The 45-year-old, who has a shop at Pugh’s garden village in Wenvoe, said demand was “incredible”.
The garden shed is taking off as a potential working from home space too, said Jamie.
“Garden offices are definitely high interest at the moment with people thinking a nice insulated shed at the bottom of the garden might be a better option than being sat in a traffic jam for two hours every day,” he said.
“People are saying they aren’t in a rush to go back to the office for five days.”
It’s an opportunity he is ready to jump on and he is ready to make the most of the “perfect alignment”. He added: “It’s been good weather, people have been stuck at home and not being able to spend their money on other things and have turned to their gardens because it’s something they can enjoy. Holidays are looking doubtful for everyone so money is being ploughed into their gardens instead.”
THE FLOUR MILL
At the height of lockdown, it was nigh-on impossible to find flour on the shelves. Flour mills up and down the country were milling overtime but even then, they couldn’t keep up with demand.
At Talgarth Mill, in Brecon, the productive mill has been in overdrive since the beginning of lockdown. In the early days, one of the millers, Sarah Andrews, organised a community drop where she would meet groups of people one by one in laybys to hand over bags of flour.
“We’d meet in a car park or a layby somewhere and take it in turns. It was done very safely, with a table to put the flour on so people could walk in and take the bag,” said Sarah. “People would bring envelopes with money.”
She also did lots of smaller dropoffs to vulnerable people or those shielding. She added: “People would put money in an envelope and tape it to the door and I would put a bag of flour on the doorstop, take the envelope and then go back to my car and ring them and say the flour is outside and it’s safe to open the door and get it.”
Like all of the millers at Talgarth Mill, which is one of just three working mills in Wales, Sarah is a volunteer. The traditional water-powered mill operates as a not-for-profit organisation and mills six days a week producing flour for retail across Wales as well as its own bakery and cafe.
All the staff have had to work overtime to meet the massive increase in demand for flour.
“There was a really odd six weeks where they couldn’t get supplies from the big suppliers like Dove Farm and Shipton Mill,” Sarah recalled. “Everyone suffered the same. Shipton Mill has only just resumed taking orders on its website this month.
“We were one of the few suppliers still getting flour to our retailers. Whereas before lockdown one deli would order 10 or 12 of something every two or three months, that became 40 or 60 of things, and they wanted it twice a week.
“It’s been a huge change in terms of volume of demand.”
Sarah puts the extraordinary demand down to people stockpiling and panicking about bread. Lockdown has also provided the perfect time for people to start baking.
Sarah said: “It’s something you can do at home and it’s quite simple.”
Lockdown has boosted sales of not just their strong wheat flour, which is used for bread-making but also their softer flour for baking.
But with many of the volunteers being older, many have taken time out shielding or self-isolating. With just half of their volunteers working, operating hours at the mill have switched from 10-4 to more like 8-8.
She has never seen it so busy. “It’s not even just a week, its been week after week after week.”