Munro Footwear Group chief experience officer Lee Munro details how the wholesale side of the business traded through Victoria's lockdowns.
During lockdown one, our warehouse and distribution centre was able to operate and we had orders already taken from customers but there was a lot of nervousness in the market.
However, a lot of other people and a lot of other locations fared quite well quite quickly.
Lots of rural areas where there were no cases - or next to no cases - even in the first stages, were trading and open and doing relatively well the whole way through.
So being able to fulfil and support those guys went really well through lockdown one and even before the second lockdown.
I think during the second lockdown what we were finding really challenging – being a Melbourne based business – was putting ranges together and then trying to present those ranges.
How do we present them to our wholesale customers? How do we present a collection of shoes that takes up 200 square metres via Zoom?
Those type of challenges were new and that was something that we had to work through.
The other challenge we faced was that we had delays in many of our deliveries given the supply chain problems that happened around the world because of COVID.
So it was a challenge getting as much out the door as we normally would but we had the guys working really hard out there and we tried to work really intelligently too, so they could get through it.