Back in March, Ragtrader spoke to Mosaic Brands CEO Scott Evans about how the business was managing COVID-19 across its 1,400 store empire. Now five months and two retail shutdowns later, Ragtrader asked Evans to reflect on the past couple of months.
I think if you talk to most people in retail, they'll probably tell you as I definitely will, that I don't think anybody's ever worked so hard as what it's been like since that February-March timeline.
The first thing was the hardest to do, which is something that you never think you will do in your career, is close 1400 shops.
That was a big call and we did a massive amount of research and even spoke to the government to make sure we were doing the right thing.
You can have risk and strategy days but this has never been contemplated, so we did the research to try and understand the intricacies of that to make sure everybody ticks the right boxes and to make sure everybody was safe.
How many times have you heard of someone being stood down? It just doesn't happen.
That was a really interesting exercise but the good news is is that we got there.
So it was an easy choice to put everybody's safety first [and close] but to execute it knowing that you're going to stand the best part of 6500 thousand people down [was difficult].
At that time in March, there was so much uncertainty but I think it's fair to say that most people didn't know which way was up.
I remember even announcing to the team, thinking in my head when I told them, that we'd be closed for 10 days maybe two weeks. It turned into almost 10 weeks, it was enormous amount of time.
That was a bit tough but we travelled through.
A couple of weeks later, the good news was that the JobKeeper came out which was really good because I think that just gave everyone a bit more certainty.
I think what happened at that time was that retailers started to realise it's not necessarily about finance or profitability or any of those things.
It's just about keeping people safe and trying to keep people in work.
So JobKeeper came out and that made business a little bit better, still lots of challenges but a little bit better.
Then we opened up at the end of May we opened all stores and we started to try it again. (The business has since now closed its entire Victorian store network during Stage 4).
It was kind of ironic; I think that when you work all your career, you long for the day where you might get a bit of time off and then when people are forced to stay at home for 10 weeks they can't wait to get out of the house and come back again.
So there was a lot of positivity to come back.