Survived, thrived
Black-owned B’klyn store rebounds after woes
With the coronavirus pandemic came a lot of fear and devastation, especially for small businesses, but patience, perseverance and adaptability has paid off for Brooklyn store owner Achuziam Maha-Sanchez.
As the illness spread, Maha-Sanchez was forced to close the doors of her home-goods shop peace + RIOT, on Tompkins Ave. in Bedford-Stuyvesant. She paid her employees out of her pocket as her savings dwindled.
“We were scared for those two months when COVID hit and we shut down,” Maha-Sanchez told the Daily News. “We just finally got ourselves out of debt, and now all of a sudden COVID happened and I was afraid.”
She had reason to be scared, as this was not Maha-Sanchez’s first rodeo. The 48-year-old had to shutter her first store when the housing bubble burst in 2008, after five years in business.
“My mom said to me, ‘Why would you have a home store when people can’t hold on to their houses?’ ” she recalled.
Peace + RIOT was able to get
a Paycheck Protection Program loan last spring, which helped.
Then, after the death of George Floyd brought protests and more awareness of Blackowned businesses, Maha-Sanchez saw a surge in calls and customers.
“We may have done five online orders the entire year in 2019, then we did 90 orders in a month. That was in June,” she
said.
Around the same time, Maha-Sanchez reopened the store, which sells everything from $2.50 incense to $25 candles to a bar cabinet for just under $2,000. She began selling some items on the sidewalk and allowing 10 customers in the store at a time, while others waited outside.
“The neighborhood was starving for anything,” she said. “They shopped harder with us on the sidewalk than they ever shopped with the doors open.”
Maha-Sanchez — a wife and mother to a 10-year-old son — is diabetic and worried about COVID-19, so she still mostly works from home, where she packages and ships online orders.
When she opened the shop in 2013, she had a spot on Nostrand Ave., but she knew she had to move.
“Nostrand still wasn’t the right avenue to be on,” she said. “People were whizzing by.”
After convincing Councilman Robert Cornegy (D-Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights) to move his office to another nearby storefront, she took peace + RIOT to Tompkins Ave. near Jefferson Ave.
Maha-Sanchez, whose family has lived in the same Hancock St. brownstone her grandparents bought in 1937, said she’s proud of the stretch of Tompkins Ave. that’s home to dozens and dozens of Black-owned businesses.
“These are business people who are thriving,” she said. “The fact that we have strong brands on our strip is a big deal.”