Businesses hope to get some action for Mother’s Day
Published:Sunday | May 17, 2020 | 8:48 AMVanessa James/Gleaner Writer
Just last year, one could find a variety of deals and promotions for Mother’s Day with ease, but for 2020, the opposite is true. This change could be connected with the coronavirus pandemic and a number of businesses having to close their doors for safety reasons or a drastic loss in profits.
However, there are business owners, who still saw it fit to offer special deals for the special day and decided to advertise on the heavily trafficked Instagram platform. These owners expressed that since the pandemic, things have not be very profitable but they hope that a Mother’s Day offering will bridge the gap.
Michaelia ‘Jazmin Sang’ Sangster, owner of a two-year old venture called Jazmin’s Confectionery provides beautifully decorated cakes and pastries by order. Sangster said it is a norm for her to have a Mother’s Day special and felt this year shouldn’t be different,
“I usually have a Mother’s Day promotion, also on Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day; every holiday that I can take advantage of, I have a promotion for it,” she said, “Sales are usually great, but given the coronavirus it hasn’t been.”
Sangster expressed that with things so slow, she hopes that Mother’s Day sales will give her business a lift.
“For Mother’s Day, I am literally expecting the unexpected; if I should get a certain amount of orders, I am just making sure that I am prepared, but I’m not stressing it too much. Given the whole situation with the coronavirus, I know that it might not give me one of the greatest results,” Sangster said.
Another owner, Joan Bucknor of Joan’s Flowers & Gifts, a 12-year-old business in Spanish Town, St Catherine said she did not usually have to do promotions, and if she did, she would use WhatsApp, but this year, she thought she had to make a small investment and did paid advertising for her Mother’s Day deals.
“Initially, I was wondering if people were going to celebrate their mothers in this fashion, based on what we are going through (coronavirus). I thought about it and I said, ‘No matter what, you have to celebrate your mother’ so I decided to go ahead and try it,” Bucknor stated.
She explained that the two-week lockdown was particularly hard for her, and before that sales were down, but with walk-ins purchasing birthday gifts, Bucknor is hopeful that Mother’s Day will yield some profit also.