When Better Off Duds turned eight years old on March 21, it was far from the celebration that owner Nicola Tabb had once envisioned.
Instead inviting customers to shop and celebrate, the vintage clothing store was closed because of COVID-19 precautions and Tabb was at home panicking, wondering how to keep the business running in the midst of the pandemic.
“I saw (the closures) coming on the weekend of the Junos,” Tabb said. “I was very excited for the Junos because I sell to a lot of musicians on a regular basis. I was having people message me from out of town asking to get first dibs (on items) so I was banking on a pretty awesome weekend — then the Junos were cancelled.”
Tabb closed the shop’s doors, knowing people were nervous about being out and about. At the time she thought the closure would only last a couple days, but then the government closed non-essential businesses and Tabb realized she was going to have to find a workaround.
Though she had previously used Instagram to advertise fun pieces of clothing to draw people into the store, she began to use it as a selling platform — though with so many followers eager to buy items, Tabb said it quickly became exhausting to monitor.
“Things were being sold within minutes of me posting — I think the record is like one minute,” she said. “I’d be checking timestamps (on comments from customers wanting to purchase) on Facebook and Instagram, but a couple of hours of that and you get exhausted pretty quickly from just staring at your phone.”
To mitigate the extra work, Tabb knew the next step was to create an online shop. The idea had been floating around her mind for a while before the pandemic hit, but she had not had time to run her shop while also itemizing, photographing and listing every article of clothing for sale online.
So she began researching selling platforms and soon hired someone to help set up a site. Just as the site was getting up and running, the province allowed businesses like hers to reopen.
“Those first couple of weeks I was open I overextended myself too hard,” Tabb said. Not only was she running a new online store, she was also running the storefront — which involved abiding by a number of stringent mandated safety rules.
But by cutting down the days the storefront is open from seven to four and utilizing one day a week to photograph and upload items to the online store with the help of an employee, Tabb says the workload is balancing out and things are slowly getting back to normal — or as normal as they can be in the COVID-19 world.
She said her only regret is that she didn’t think to expand her stock of vintage sleepwear and loungewear pre-pandemic since everyone is now spending all their time in sweatpants.
But even with the lack of leisure wear, Tabb has seen a surge in customers since the pandemic began.
“The pandemic has made people be more conscious about where they are spending their dollars and I am super appreciative of that,” she said. “I’ve had huge growth in my customer base — I’m not sure where they are all coming from, but I’m not going to complain.”
Better Off Duds
Owner: Nicola Tabb
Address: 510A 33rd Street West
Hours: Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Phone: 306-979-3837
Email:
betteroffduds@gmail.com
Website:
www.betteroffduds.ca
Check
Facebook
and
Instagram
If you have recently opened a new business, moved an existing business or made significant changes to how your business runs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and wish to be featured in an upcoming edition of New Faces New Places, please reach out to StarPhoenix reporter Erin Petrow at epetrow@postmedia.com for consideration.