Something heard time and time again throughout the pandemic was just how much businesses were forced to “pivot” their models and how they reached their customers. Turns out, with changing consumer trends and economic uncertainty, the pivoting has not slowed down.
Someone who knows this better than anyone is Lisa Couture, owner of Couture Candy PTBO. Since launching her company from the spare bedroom of her home seven years ago, she has opened three storefronts, downsized to one, switched to a live-selling model, transitioned to a hybrid model, and will soon be returning to that spare bedroom as she shuts down her remaining storefront.
“I’m literally getting back to where it started from seven years ago,” she says. “I’m really excited about it. It’s just getting back to basics.”
That pivot, which will be followed by more days of live selling and more community involvement, is driven by Couture’s desire to spend more time with her 13-year-old and 15-year-old children after feeling she’s missed a lot of time with them and with her husband over the past several years of operating a successful business.
“I want a slower life,” she says. “I want to make more memories instead of bigger margins.”
Couture’s latest pivot marks the second of the year, following Couture Candy PTBO’s transition to entirely live selling, a model which entails sellers presenting products to buyers and responding to questions over a social media livestream.
Couture explains that going live for an hour leads to dozens of orders and thousands in sales, while selling out of her pink storefront on George Street for six hours per day could result in $40 in sales.
“I really believe in the live shopping model,” she says. “I really believe that Peterborough and more rural parts of Canada are going to figure out that ‘Wow, this is really a booming trend that I should get on with.’ The way I feel about live selling is the way I felt when I first started my business. It’s just a bigger way for me to get my kindness theory and model and bring a little bit more joy outside of our community.”
Not all consumer trends are destined to stick around, so how does Couture know when it’s time to make a pivot? She says it’s all about trusting your gut and working hard.
“People have said this to me and I always say it to other people: nobody knows our business better than we do,” Couture says. “I just got so excited about a live-selling model because it still gives me the connection to people, just in a different way. I think keeping up with the times and the type of product-based business that I have, it just really works.”
She adds that she never wants to “discredit” the work she’s put into the live selling. She’s been doing it for nearly three years now, well before she transitioned to doing it full time and before it became mainstream.
“Some days I had nobody watching and then this week I’ve had hundreds of people watching, and that’s because I’ve gone through those really awful growing pains of getting no orders but still persevering.”
Despite the successes, Couture’s pivot decisions haven’t always been met with enthusiasm online. Earlier this month, a social media post about her shifting business hours resulted in some harsh comments.
Couture says she was “fully unprepared” for the backlash and, while she understands men may not understand balancing motherhood and running a successful business, it was the critiques from women that surprised her most.
“That really got to me because I’m such an advocate for women, especially women who are running their business and raising their families,” she says.
“As women, especially women in business, we’re damned if we choose we want to work and we’re damned if we choose that we don’t want to work. The fact I’m doing a little working situation where the number one priority is my family and people weren’t happy with that, I was very surprised.”
Couture decided those offering negative critique were not “her people” and instead focused her energy on the supportive comments she received from the community that’s always been by her side.
“All you can ask for as a small business is to have a consistent group of people who see your value, love your product, and just really want to support you in that way,” she says.
“Even on my lives (livestreams) every single week, if I get 50 orders, 30 of them are coming from people who order every week or every month. I can tell you their children’s names and their dog’s name and where they live and where they went on vacation. Those are my true cheerleaders that I’m just super grateful for.”
Though Couture says she’ll miss the “day-to-day” of people dropping into the storefront when it closes at the end of August, there is still much to look forward to.
She promises to be out in the community at events more often, to host live-selling events five times per week rather than twice, and to develop partnerships so local customers still have a pick-up point for their orders. She says she is also working on making shipping available to customers outside of Canada.
All of these changes will give her more flexibility than the storefront allowed, giving Couture more time with her children as they’re growing up.
“When I started this business, I was raising babies, and then I was raising toddlers and going through elementary school, and now I have teenagers,” she says. “As my personal life evolves, so does my business, but the core piece of it is that I don’t want them to become adults and have missed this part. That’s really what it comes down to.”
Despite the many pivots she’s gone through over seven years, Couture remains grateful to those who have stuck by her side through it all.
“I never would have done any of this without downtown Peterborough — specifically, the other small business owners and the women in my life who have made this happen,” she says. “I have such a special group of people in a special part of our city that doesn’t get a lot of recognition. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of it without everybody.”
For more information about Couture Candy PTBO, visit couturecandyptbo.ca.
