How Businesses are Thriving During the Coronavirus Pandemic
For many businesses in the UK, coronavirus is the toughest challenge that they have ever had to face. Customers under lockdown, shops, pubs, restaurants and so on had to shut and the world pretty much came to a standstill. As a result, many companies have had to call it a day as they were unable to adapt to the new circumstances.
Industries hit particularly hard by the pandemic include:
- Transportation (airlines, cruise lines, etc.)
- Hospitality (restaurants, bars, hotels)
- Health and beauty (hairdressers, barbers, gyms, etc.)
- Assembly manufacturing (automotive, meat-packing, etc.)
Despite the majority of businesses having a dismal year, there have been some companies that have seen success during the COVID pandemic. Here, we take a look at the sectors and businesses that are succeeding despite unprecedented challenges and how they have done it.
Five industries and businesses succeeding in the coronavirus lockdown
Personal Protective Equipment
Personal protective equipment (PPE), such as face masks and covers, hand sanitiser, gloves and goggles, has been one of the most demanded resources of this pandemic. With most PPE having expiry dates, constant fresh supplies were needed to keep reserves well stocked, and there will be calls for hospitals to have stockpiles in place should similar crises break out in the future.
Smart PPE has also emerged out of the pandemic, as manufacturers seek to make equipment as safe and easy to use as possible. For example, digital safety glasses are a new product that not only protects the eyes but can also supply information to the wearer while they carry out their job.
Food and Drink
At the start of the pandemic, there was a significant increase in search queries related to food deliveries from major supermarkets, including Asda, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Tesco and Waitrose.
Source: Google Trends
As a result, supermarkets were struggling to meet the demand of their customers and implemented changes to help manage the increase in interest. This included prioritising vulnerable shoppers, developing new tools such as virtual shopping queues and offering essential food boxes.
Additionally, pubs, restaurants and cafes that were urged to close their venues transformed their business to include deliveries by offering essential food boxes, home delivery services and promotions, such as wine tastings, cook-alongs and home meal kits.
Similarly, there has been significant growth in searches for takeaways and home food deliveries, such as Uber Eats, Just Eat, Deliveroo, Gousto and Hello Fresh.
Home Entertainment
With many of us working from home and having limited social interaction, people have been looking for entertainment. Existing forms of online home entertainment have seen increases in branded searches and subscriptions over the past 12 months.
With the closure of cinemas, Netflix and other online streaming services saw an influx of new subscribers. Disney+, which launched in the UK in March 2020, had more than 86 million subscribers by the end of the year. Analysts predict that on-demand services will increase by 81% over the next five years to reach 1.16 billion subscriptions worldwide.
The coronavirus pandemic has encouraged gamers both new and existing to pick up controllers more often over the last year. In March, Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons saw higher sales than all of the series’ previous games combined, while the game streaming platform Twitch saw a 10% increase in usage in just one month, according to gamingindustry.biz.
While online streaming services and gaming have reaped the benefits of a captive audience, so have more traditional hobbies such as reading. In the UK, more than 200 million books were sold in 2020 - the highest volume since 2012, according to estimates from Nielsen BookScan.
Home and Garden
Thanks to the lockdown, there was a whole new perspective on homes as we invited new people into our homes via Zoom and other video conferencing software. Online orders and referrals rapidly increased for home and garden brands in the first lockdown. When restrictions eased, we spent money on days out and trips away, and when they were tightened, we once again focussed on improving our homes.
Source: Office for National Statistics - Monthly Business Survey - Retail Sales Inquiry
Many of us turned our attention towards our gardens, including city dwellers with very limited space, resulting in a boost in online sales during the first lockdown. This continued when shops reopened and is set to blossom further in the future with the gardening market reaching £81 billion) by 2025 at an annual rate of 4.2%, according to Market Research Future.
Health and Fitness
Gyms and other health and fitness facilities are closed due to the pandemic, meaning the fitness-conscious have had to look elsewhere to keep fit and healthy. Many gyms and fitness studios were able to offer their fitness services online. For instance, The Body Coach Joe Wicks became the nation’s PE teacher encouraging hundreds of thousands of families to take part in his YouTube workouts, while sales of Chris Hemsworth’s fitness app Centr saw a 300% increase in downloads in April 2020.
Additionally, as people avoided public transport to reduce the risk of spreading coronavirus, many turned to travelling on two wheels. From late March, the UK’s Association of Cycle Traders (ACT) reported a boom in bike sales and repairs. This trend is set to continue after the pandemic as prime minister Boris Johnson pledged £2 billion to the cycling cause, offering £50 vouchers for bike repairs, bike lessons for everyone and the introduction of hundreds of miles of new cycling lanes across the country.
How to Succeed During a Pandemic
Many businesses that have seen success during the coronavirus outbreak were quick to react to the changes in circumstances or already had appropriate processes and procedures in place to cope with the changes. Here, we take a look at what businesses did to help drive success so we might learn from this.
1. Be innovative
The pandemic has provided many companies with an opportunity to try new things that will help them be more successful in the long run. With the pandemic forcing pubs, bars and restaurants to close, as well as schools and universities, there was a shift towards takeaways. Catering24 also shifted in order to heavily increase the volume of their takeaway offering.
Speaking of the changes, Ollie Lloyd, director at Catering24 said: “It felt risky at the time, given the reactive nature of how decisions were being made with COVID-19, but we managed to pull it off. We analysed the type of enquiries we were receiving and we made a judgement based on the information we had.”
Ben and Alice from coffee subscription service RISE also found innovation to be key in their success and said: “If you believe in your business, you just have to keep working hard at it and explore every avenue until you find what works for you. We have played with designs, products, marketing channels, etc. and still try to optimise all the time. Hang in there, it's tough times for everyone at the moment, keep adapting!”
2. Streamline processes
When companies need to cut costs, a common reaction is to add more layers to processes. Online beer retailer Best of British Beer quickly adapted to streamline the order fulfilment process when orders increased seven-fold by removing products and processes that were resource-hungry.
3. Relationships are key
Co-owner of Best of British Beer Gill Sherwin said: “We couldn’t have coped with the increased volume of orders without the strong supplier base and flexible workforce that we have. We were able to call people in and our suppliers were just fantastic at supporting us with urgent requests that were way above forecast.”
Catering24's Ollie Lloyd also speaks about the importance of relationships during challenging times: “It was important that we held a good relationship with manufacturers and we paid over and above our credit terms in order to secure stock - that gave us a massive advantage within the market.”
4. Focus on what you do best
To maintain business continuity during the pandemic, SafetyBuyer, a one-stop-shop for health and safety products, had to adapt its selling approach. Co-founder Kevin Rowe said: “We realised that construction had never really locked down completely and, as this is a key sector for us, we gave particular focus here.
“Our customers still valued reliability, so we focussed on offering solutions we knew we could deliver. We didn’t set out to sell the most of this or that but simply wanted to sell enough to keep the business moving forward in the long term.”
Read about the successes that some businesses have seen over the pandemic: