It’s no secret that the global COVID-19 situation has changed businesses overnight. While some businesses continue to fight on, others unfortunately had to furlough employees and close their doors. Because of this fact, there has never been a more important time to make sure your business is evolving with the times to maintain stability and establish longevity through crisis. You are living in the digital age where not all businesses have to rely on foot traffic to generate revenue!
Now is not the time to quit! Push forward and persevere through these hard times. As a business owner, perseverance should be in your blood! But it’s going to take some strategizing to make sure you’re making smart moves moving forward or else you’ll find yourself moving backwards.
Earlier this week in our live stream, Victor Pena (OmniPrint President/CEO) revealed his top 5 strategies that businesses should be doing to thrive and succeed through the current economic crisis caused by COVID-19.
Strategy #1: Create or Build A Brand Online
Now is the time to improve your digital presence. If you have no digital presence, get to work! NOW is the time to ensure you have a digital solution in place to generate revenue from traffic online. There is no better time to set up a brand with a store completely online than now! Come up with some designs all with a theme (topical, funny, etc), build an online store where you can upload and sell your designs, and blast it out to your customers via email and social media! People are isolated to their homes so they’re on their phones, tablets, and laptops browsing the web and shopping! Take advantage of this market shift and make sure you’re set up to digitally generate revenue!
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Strategy #2: Advertise A Fulfillment Service
Due to recent orders, the larger fulfillment services are now closed! This means that there are massive amounts of orders that are now unfulfilled or cancelled! In addition, there’s hundreds of thousands of potential prints that these fulfillment companies now cannot service! As a small business or home-based business, NOW is the time to leverage this market absence to get orders in the door! Use this time to advertise your fulfillment services with no minimums while illustrating that you remain open for business through these times! Who knows, there could be a moderately sized streetwear brand that was depending on big name fulfillment companies that you can now fulfill and even become their regular garment printer moving forward! The key here is to show you’re still delivering value while the big companies aren’t!
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Strategy #3: Partner With Local Screen Printers For Referrals
In just 7 days, the economy has taken a huge hit. Because of this, there’s going to be significantly less bulk orders coming in for screen printers that were creating items for schools, events, and others that have been affected by recent events. While your local surrounding screen printers may have been competition in the past, this is the time to band together and synergize! You offer one-off and small-run solutions that they can’t! Work out a partnership where for any one-off and small-run orders sent your way, they get a cut! Right now every business can use every dollar they can generate so they would be foolish to not accept such a partnership!
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Strategy #4: Partner With Closed Businesses For Merch
As a result of the current crisis, many businesses have unfortunately had to temporarily close their doors, leaving them with no way to generate revenue! Many of these businesses depend on their established customer base and following whether barbers, personal trainers, tattoo artists, cafes, small business retailers, and other independent businesses which were forced to close due to restrictions. While these businesses can’t deliver the same services they regularly do, their value in the eyes of their following remains unscathed. These are all people that are willing to support through hard times! Leverage this fact to offer a merchandising solution for these businesses with no minimum requirements that will force them to carry an inventory! Create merchandise for these businesses at wholesale cost which they can sell at retail to generate revenue at this time where no revenue is coming in. Once this is all over, you will have made a name with helping these businesses while possibly even continuing to create merchandise for them!
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Strategy #5: Take Advantage Of Equipment Maintenance
Take advantage of this time to properly maintain the equipment in your shop! Whether you’re still working or not, it’s key to give your printer a thorough and meticulous clean while you have the time to do so! If you’re powering through and still producing garments at this time, amazing job! Make sure you have a healthy stock of inks, pretreatments, and consumables to ensure you keep running with no discrepancies! If you’re planning on idling until this all blows over, make sure you have enough cleaner to keep your printer wet capped! In addition, ensure you have enough cleaner for a flush if you’re planning on long-term downtime beyond 30 days.
To help with the situation, OmniPrint is proudly currently offering 10% off of supply orders with free shipping on orders over $250 (1/2 of the usual free shipping rate) in our online store by entering the coupon code “supply10“. Be sure to take advantage of the deal and stay stocked up!
