Hope woven into fabric of recovery
THERE ARE STILL CHALLENGES AHEAD FOR US, BUT WE ARE OPTIMISTIC THAT MAINIE WILL CONTINUE TO SURVIVE AND THRIVE TO BECOME A GLOBAL BRAND.
CHARMAINE SAUNDERS
MAINIE entered 2020 great promise.
In the five years since the launch of our Aboriginal fashion business in Cairns, we had achieved rapid growth.
Our sales revenues were consistently trending upwards and we were in a strong position as a reputable wholesale supplier of ethical Aboriginal art products across local, domestic and international markets. We employed seven local people at our Cairns head office and retail gallery.
However, by March 2020, it was over. We closed our Aboriginal art gallery in Scott St and shut our pop-up shop at the Cairns Cruise Liner Terminal.
We stood down our entire staff. The retailers who stocked our products at tourist shopping precincts, including airports, cancelled their orders.
Our revenues came to a standstill.
To add to this heartache, our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become the exclusive supplier of indigenous fashions to the retail shop in the Australian Pavilion at World Expo 2020 in Dubai evaporated with the announcement that the event would not go ahead this year.
My husband, Denis Keeffe and I had invested everything we had into building our business and it looked as though we would lose it all.
Small business life is stresswith ful even during the best of times, but the emotional toll of having to advise our staff, our Aboriginal artists, our suppliers, and our creditors that we were shutting down our business was devastating. The worst was not knowing how long the shutdown would last.
All we could do was tighten our belts and hope that we would make it through. The first glimmer of hope during those dark days was the support we received from our friends across the Cairns business community.
Everyone was affected, but they reached out to make sure that their friends were OK.
This shared spirit of helping each other soon spread across our entire community as the council, local media and organisations like TTNQ launched campaigns to support local businesses.
Further lifelines came to us when our commercial landlords advised us that they were suspending our rent payments.
Then the announcement of the JobKeeper program allowed us to re-employ longstanding key staff members and gave us the capacity to pivot from being a predominantly national wholesale business to being able to sell our art and fashion products directly to customers around the world through our online shop at mainie.com.
There are still challenges ahead for us, but we are optimistic that Mainie will continue to survive and thrive to become a global brand.
Charmaine Saunders is managing director of Mainie Australia