‘Community Haul’ Gives N.S. Businesses A Lifeline During Covid-19
HALIFAX — As Nova Scotia’s small businesses grapple with the economic fallout of Covid-19, a local subscription box business has launched to help them reach new markets.
Nova Scotia’s Community Haul aims to connect Nova Scotians eager to support the local economy with local businesses from across the province.
For $52 a month, subscribers will be sent a box containing five to seven locally sourced products, curated from “some of Nova Scotia’s most unique vendors and producers.”
Products range from clothing and gourmet snacks to accessories and hand-made art. Some come from better-known brands like East Coast Lifestyle and Made With Local, but most are from lesser-known “small and micro businesses.”
Matt Symes is the CEO of the social enterprise Symplicity Designs and the brain behind Nova Scotia’s Community Haul. He says the initiative will support more than 100 local Nova Scotia businesses with bulk orders while donating a portion of all sales to the IWK Foundation to help families in the region.
He says he created the service to help the province’s small businesses make it through the pandemic by making it easy for them to reach consumers who want to support them but might not know how to do it.
“If you ask Atlantic Canadians, 70 percent of them want to support local,” Symes says. “But they’re also unsure of how to interact [with small businesses] in this new world. So how do we create something that can introduce all these people who want to spend locally to all the local producers?”
Community Haul has been designed to make that process simple, by giving people a “one-or-two-click” way to put money into the local economy.
A Leg Up For Struggling Businesses
For some, Community Haul will act as a crucial life-support system, providing enough business to keep products moving and people working.
Chantal Gelinas is the operations manager at All-Ways-Us, a social enterprise whose workforce is primarily people with intellectual disabilities.
Gelinas says the business is “really struggling” because of Covid-19.
All-Ways-Us sells hand-made soap and candles at farmer’s markets and in other retailer’s storefronts. But with markets moving online and many of their retail partners closed, revenue has plummeted.
Normally, Gelinas employers about a dozen people, but she says she’s only been able to keep five of them working through the pandemic.
She says filling orders for Community Haul will be an important way to keep people working, but it will also provide crucial advertising for the cash-strapped business.
“We’re pretty excited. We don’t have a whole lot of money to advertise — there’s no marketing or anything like that — so this is a good way for us to get our name out there,” she says.
“Most of our interest is local, it’s extremely local, so we’re pretty excited that people all across the province, and all across the country… will have an option to see some of our stuff and what can we do,” she adds.
Spending Locally Twice As Impactful
Symes says signal boosting small, local businesses is one of the most important aspects of Community Haul.
According to the CFIB, only 64 percent of Nova Scotia’s small businesses have successfully reopened after the pandemic. Of those, only 25 percent are back to normal pre-pandemic sales.
The fact that local businesses are struggling is sad on its face, but Symes points out that it’s an extremely worrying economic prospect as well.
Research has shown that money spent at local businesses has more than double the economic impact of spending money at their chain store competitors.
For every $100 spent locally, $63 is re-circulated back into the local economy. At chain stores, only $14 stays in the community.
“So the circular impact of spending your dollars locally is huge,” Symes says. “Supporting local is not only a nice thing to do, it’s an economically sound decision for the health of your community.”
Alison Brown Dolmont is the owner/operator of Halifax-based Olga Designs, another of the companies whose products will be showcased in a Community Haul box.
Community Haul has the potential to have a huge impact on her personally but she stresses how crucial supporting businesses like her is for the province’s economy.
“I think we all see how important it is to keep that cycle going locally,” she says. Initiatives like Community Haul are “how we continue to strengthen our community bonds and continue to have a strong, healthy society that supports one another.”
“I think Nova Scotians are really good at supporting each other, and that’s something I’m really proud to be Nova Scotian for. We just have this wonderful desire to want to lift each other up, especially in a time like Covid,” she adds.
More Than Just Multi-Nationals
Symes says acting on that desire to support one another will be important if Nova Scotians want to retain the diverse small business landscape that makes the province interesting.
“If we come out of this and the only thing that’s left are the large, multi-national corporations, and all of the local flair of our communities are gone because they couldn’t make it, we will have failed. We may be safe, but we will have failed,” he says.
It’s why he hopes enough people decide to support Community Haul to make it viable. While the company is founded on a social enterprise model, it still needs to turn a profit in order to survive.
Symes says they’ll need to sell at least 1,000 subscriptions to make that happen. Initial numbers look good, but “we’re nowhere where we need to be yet.”
“We need people to move beyond that’s a great idea to opening their wallet and committing to it,” he says.
Symes says Community Haul will be a short-term project that will only last for a year. The first boxes will be sent out in October, and by January subscriptions will be closed.
Anyone interested in subscribing to the service, or who wants to find out more about becoming a vendor, can find out more at communityhaul.ca.