7 minute read
Samantha Wills: Weathering Storms
My new email opening line has become: How are you are doing in this surreal time? Not just because it seems more apt for this time than the generically polite, how are you? But surreal, because it is the best word I can summon up to encapsulate our current normal; it is good and it is bad, it is loud and it is quiet. It is the arguments and personal hoarding we saw in the loo paper aisle. It is also people withdrawing their government stimulus and sliding it anonymously under the front doors of local businesses with a few written words along the lines of, 'I don’t need this money, and I wanted you to have it. I hope your doors reopen soon.' ‘We’re all in the same boat’ is a phrase I have been hearing a lot these past few weeks and while I understand the intentions of it, it is in and of itself somewhat of a privileged statement to make. Because the truth is we are not all in the same boat.
Some of us are in boats that have savings onboard while others are in boats that rely on that week’s paycheck to put food on the table. A paycheck that for many no longer exists. Some of us are in seemingly crowed boats and have had to become instant schoolteachers and some of us are in really, really isolated boats and have had to sit entirely on our own for a few months. If the boat we find ourselves in is in Australian waters, on a health level we are in one of the luckiest boats, but it’s a very different boat to those experiencing this pandemic in many parts around the world. So, we’re not all in the same boat at all. We’re all weathering the same storm, but we are most definitely not all in the same boat. Origins and our return to them is something else I have observed over these past two months. Stay home was the clear directive. In the very early weeks before border closures, many of us travelled home to our country of origin – back to our motherland, doing so not knowing when the impending closing borders would be reopened again. Some of us may have travelled back to our childhood home or to where our immediate family now resides.
To pass the time we have revisited hobbies we haven’t picked up in years, going back to what it was like before work commutes, social engagements and stacked weekends consumed our life making us feel we were always running from one thing to the next.
This very magazine you are reading has gone back to its origins. Businesses – especially small businesses – have had to go back to their origins, back to the core of what they do and in doing so look at new ways they can expand on that. To buy time till we have more details or see the full extent of damage, to tread the storm waters until the economy starts to move again… and ultimately, until that time, simply to survive.
Good brands will survive this. Business is what we do, and our brand is the very essence of why we do it. People are loyal to brands, not business. It’s hard for people to get emotionally involved with a P&L, but you better believe they connect to a brand that is in turn loyal to them. A brand that shares the same world view they do, a brand that right now is not trying to sell them something they don’t need, but rather acknowledges that they are in the trenches with them. Consumers will remember how brands made them feel in this time, and that feeling will be acknowledged with where they choose to spend their money.
I had a business for 15 years. It was an accessories brand I started at the age of 21. For the final two of those 15 years, there was an unsettling within me that was uneasy at best, deafening at worse. I was unable to admit that my heart was no longer in the company, I was crippled by thought of change rather than optimistic about the thought of possibility. So instead, I remained in a holding pattern of a lack of passion and ample amount of fear.
Change: it scares more people than it excites, and it’s one of the few things we can be certain of in life. In times of uncertainty we jump to worst-case scenario and our catastrophic thinking takes hold. We rarely experience the early motions of change and rejoice in the opportunities it may bring.
And then finally, in the June of 2018 I made the decision to close the business. It was the biggest decision I had ever made and was all I had known my entire adult life. As I had (ever so modestly) named the brand after myself, I did not wish to sell my name, so instead of offering the brand to the highest bidder, I instead made the decision with my business partner to announce that we were closing. Our plan was to run the stock down over the following six months and in that time celebrate the brand and its people.
In January 2019 we closed the doors on that business for good.
In addition to not losing control of my name, I made the decision to close instead of sell as it was how I believed it best to honour the legacy of the brand and all it had stood for, for well over a decade. Some called me mad, many called me stupid, most told me I should be doing anything other than what I did…. but in the end it didn’t matter, because there was something in me, an unsettling, that was going to continue on until I addressed it. Something in me longed to work again on my dining table, to go back to being a sole trader and cut out the big commercial requirements and minimum order quantities, not having to worry about teams and logistics and international lead times. And so, after 15 years, that’s what I did.
Going back to my origins allowed me to quieten the mind so I could hear what the heart had to say. And it turns out when I was able to dial all that noise down, what I thought I ‘should’ be doing was quite different to what I actually wanted to be doing.
Unsettlings come in different forms, some loud and swift, some silent and simmering. The bigger the storm, the bigger our return to origins. The greater our need to re-strategise, rescale, return, maybe reinvent or reroute. And as with anything that forces change upon us, what it doesn’t allow us to do is resist. And I think that’s the commonality of this storm.
Good business will survive this, but they won’t be the same as they were, but nothing will be. Some days that excites me greatly, other days it scares the shit out of me.
It is a universal law that in life shake-ups and stripdowns happen along the way. It might come as an internal unsettling within us that forces us to shed things in our life and either start the next chapter or start all over again, depending on which way we choose to look at it.
Maybe it's presented with an external circumstance that feels very unsettling, one that we have no choice but to face as the winds and rains feel like they are whipping around our face, and some days the ability to see where we are heading is easier than others.
We must keep an eye out for other boats, giving what we can spare. Some boats in our community may have a leak in the hull that we can assist with financially or manually, others may simply need a little wind in their sails, which can easily be tended to with an outreaching of thoughtfulness or a random act of kindness. But what we cannot assume is that everyone’s boat is the same.
So, as the clouds start to break and a little light starts to shine through, let us all continue to stand as strong as we can to weather this storm, because that is the thing we are all in together. To hear more of Samantha's thoughts, follow the Samantha Wills Foundation samanthawills.com
