Crises are a time to leap forward not survive

A pandemic is an opportunity to adopt new technologies, to shift mindsets and to inspire your community. Great examples of this can be shown, however, one of my personally founded companies that has demonstrated this most visibly is Childsplay. Created as more of a traditional retail play space with an innovative model of adding premium wellness including mani/pedi/massage and children’s therapy rooms with freshly made food on site. Our model was to create the new child-friendly Starbucks of the High Street. Gone are the days when we should see parents with prams vying for a space inside these high street coffee shops, we should lead with the future of society, that is our children and provide them with safe and inspiring spaces to be with us in.

However, when Covid19 hit from early February we saw visitors dwindle quickly to almost no guests and soon went in to total lockdown. How do we manage to survive a brand created only 11 months prior?

Childsplay went in to digitisation overdrive, thankfully with my strong marketing/ecommerce background we were able to quickly shift our toy stores online and develop a Resource section which produced fresh content linked to our highly active instagram channel daily. We realised groceries were becoming an issue and quickly launched our online grocery order system which enabled our customers to click and collect or have delivered groceries. We contacted Deliveroo/JustEat to enable us to sell these/ add these to our menu and pushed going live with new food apps. Childsplay was the inspiration behind groceries going online for Deliveroo/ Uber eat deliveries far before all the major supermarkets joined this trend.

Activities for children became essential so we drove online classes and daily activity suggestions, dictionary words a day for the children and created activity packs which could be purchased for a topic each week.

We contacted our partners at Treatwell to create bespoke online - How To videos with expert therapists to 1. Ensure customers received useful information and support 2. To keep our brand alive in the mind of our customers during this hard time.

Ultimately the goal of all of this was to keep our brand very much present in the mind of our consumers so when they are ready to return or to shop they would always have Childsplay in their mind.

There are of course other essential strategies first and foremost remembering the old saying - Cash is King! It’s vital in the time of a criss to cut back all costs quickly, reduce operational/ fixed costs where possible and concentrate on reaching an optimal structure to preserve cash and focus mainly on your existing clients and upsell. Slow cash burn where possible. We cut back all monthly fixed costs for closed sites immediately cancelled any contracts and contacted suppliers to provide payment holidays/ contract breaks. It’s vital to act dynamically to ensure survival.

We did this by ensuring our regular clients were listened to and this is where our content ideas for our free online resources were generated from.

It’s important to not make customers feel that you’re taking advantage of them during these times so we never sought to make profit on any essential products from the groceries/ deliveries to masks/ sanitisation equipment or products. They trust you and your brand - this is the time to give back and strengthen the customer relationship and brand loyalty.

Strategic agility is another excellent area, for example if you are a B2B business and sales efforts have been impacted, prioritise product improvements in the meantime to emerge stronger when the market recovers.

Understand the impact on customer mindsets, try to make assumptions based on research/ surveys and studies on customer behaviour. Given Childsplay’s strength on social media we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to execute surveys quickly to understand customer thoughts and views as the pandemic has developed. We understood clearly that wellness would be a big focus and kidsplay may take longer to return. Chlidsplay shifted the business model quickly adapting the spaces to add more wellness facilities/ treatment rooms which would offer opportunity for much higher revenue. We think this is potentially a better shift for our sites with higher overall revenue already witnessed in the last weeks. With the full wellness offering available from July 4th we already have fully booked diaries for the first week.

Don’t forget - until you’re back open and running in full, focus on your product rather than active new sales, use this time to engage with your customers to build the best product. Be nimble and ready to adjust your product offering. This is the model at Childsplay - study, understand build and be ready for a big return.