What The Goods Mart Learned From Customers
Rachel Krupa adapted her business model during the pandemic to better serve her community.
Feb 10, 2021 | 2 min read
ALEXANDRIA, Va.—Retailers often find a niche to stand out, grow sales and gain customer loyalty. For Rachel Krupa, founder and CEO of The Goods Mart, finding the right mix of products for her 400-square-foot New York City location was key to helping her business not just survive but thrive during the pandemic and beyond.
“You’re able to see everything [in our small footprint,],” Krupa said on this week’s episode of Convenience Matters, “Retailer Deep Dive: The Goods Mart.” Over the summer, Krupa also launched a personalized snack box through a Zoom store “tour” that allowed viewers to see how to curate their own snack boxes or for someone else. “It allowed us to really personalize a snack box at a little more elevated price because it’s a half hour of Zoom with me,” she said.
Those Zoom calls allowed her to tell the product stories and conduct some market research to learn more about behaviors and trends regarding what people want and what they don’t want. “It makes us a better store to understand what people are looking for,” she said.
The store has a carefully curated selection of products but doesn’t carry the larger SKUs like bigger convenience stores.
“We’ll continue to innovate [with the snack box] and find other fun ways to elevate the brand we have and also keep it in The Goods spirit,” she said.
Some of the ways Krupa has tried to build community during this time of social distancing include utilizing the sidewalk outside her store. During good weather, she hosted cookouts, sidewalk sampling programs and other community-inspired events.
“It’s doing fun things like that,” she said. “The neighbors just love it and look forward it. It builds our community and also helps drive sales.”
Listen to the podcast for more tips from Krupa and watch additional Ideas 2 Go videos from 2019 and 2020 featuring Krupa’s store at convenience.org/thegoodsmart. Krupa also is profiled in the November 2020 issue of NACS Magazine in “Look for the Heroes.”
Each week a new Convenience Matters episode is released. With nearly 300 episodes to choose from, listeners can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play and other podcast apps and YouTube and at www.conveniencematters.com. Episodes have been downloaded more than 200,000 times by listeners around the world.
