The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our world upside down, with small businesses being hit especially hard. This is a pivotal time for SMBs, and the way they respond to the pressure will determine how their business runs for years to come. Many companies are taking this difficult situation and turning it into an opportunity. In our Positive Pivots series, we’re diving deeper into what these innovative businesses have done, and what lies beneath the surface to produce this kind of creativity and resilience.

This week we spoke with Sam Eitzen, Co-founder of Snapbar and Keep Your City Smiling, about the pivot his company made to keep his staff employed and help local small businesses.

What is Snapbar?

Snapbar is a photo booth company that my brother and I founded eight years ago. We initially worked at weddings and private events, but over time, we turned to B2B events and focused on events like office parties, conferences, and expos because it allowed us to work with repeat customers. We’ve worked with companies like Microsoft, Inc., Google, Louis Vuitton, and more. As you can imagine, we were completely reliant on the in-person event industry.

How did COVID-19 impact your operations?

Our company was growing at a fast rate but in March, that all changed. When COVID-19 hit, we lost over 3 months of business in one week. It was like an avalanche of bad news. We realized that if we wanted to keep our team, we needed to move away from events, at least for a while.

How did your product offering pivot during this unusual time?

We needed something we could start quickly and that was inexpensive. We landed on gift boxes. We analyzed the market and realized there was a lot of competition. It was a bit discouraging, but we knew we could do it.

A few days later, before the shelter-in-place orders, my brother was walking around Seattle, and it was a ghost town. He went into some of his favorite local shops and no customers were around. Every business had the same story — people were too scared to shop in person. My brother came back from that walk and said we should make gift boxes that include products from these small businesses because they’re struggling more than anyone else. That’s how we came up with the name Keep Your City Smiling.

We got a lot of press in the beginning and did about US $500,000 in sales in the first three months. Throughout the process, we wanted to make sure we were protecting the small businesses we were working with — so we would pay for all the inventory upfront and do our best to promote them in each box. We wouldn’t make these business owners agree to difficult net terms. They needed cash right away so we would eat the risk. If the product didn’t sell, we would use it ourselves or give it away for free.

How has your product offering continued to evolve over the months?

When the press died down, the sales slowed down. In one instance, we made the mistake of thinking we’d sell just as many boxes on Father’s Day as we did on Mother’s Day. That didn’t work, and we ended up sitting on a ton of inventory. With this financial hit, the press slowing down, and ads costing more, the financials no longer worked. At the same time, we realized our most lucrative orders were selling hundreds of boxes at a time to a business, not an individual. We quickly built a page on our website specifically for bulk orders where customers could curate and customize their boxes.

This helped us change from a B2C model to a B2B ‘corporate gifting’ model. We didn’t have to risk sitting on too much inventory anymore. With bulk orders, we would only get our inventory once a deal was signed.

Has there been a silver lining for your business throughout the COVID-19 pandemic?

Keep Your City Smiling was a lifeline. It did not require 18 people to work on it, but we didn’t want to fire any of our staff. Those three months allowed us to keep our team, but we kept working on more ideas for Snapbar.

Pretty soon into the pandemic, we were approached by a client of Snapbar who asked for a virtual photo booth. It didn’t exist, so our engineer built one. We were one of the first to introduce this new idea. It helped save Snapbar. Now, we’re basically running two companies. A few employees are working on Keep Your City Smiling and about 16 are working on Snapbar — that’s how busy we are with virtual events now. We’re even building a tech platform for it! But overall, we’re just happy to have kept our whole team working while supporting small businesses.