Hirsch’s director reflects on unprecedented times

As we wrap up the year soon, Hirsch’s Executive Director, Margaret Hirsch, reflected about how the pandemic affected her company, the largest independently owned electronics and appliance retail company in the country.

“2020 as everyone knows started with a bang! It was wonderful. We were in the land of milk and honey and everything was going to new heights. We thought WOW, this was going to be it. Then suddenly Covid-19 started creeping in and we didn’t know what it was, so we took no notice of it. Out of the blue on 18 March we heard that we were going to go under lockdown. Nobody really took that much notice of it, least of all us. We carried on with our lives and thought that this was just a phase and it would pass. On 22 March the lockdown started and that was a real challenge for us.

“I remember waking up on 23 March, the first day of lockdown and thinking that this was marvellous! I could sleep in! I thought that it was just for three weeks and once it was over everything would be back to normal. Little did we know …”

Lucky for Margaret, she had a wake-up call very early to survive the pandemic.

“It hit me like a ton of bricks that sleeping in was not going to be an option. I had a salary bill of millions every month and hundreds of millions to pay out to my creditors. How was I going to do this with not one cent coming into the business?

“Immediately we rallied our core team and we sat down and started to strategise. We had to call up all the favours we ever had. We had to think of things we never thought of and we had to work out how we would get through the month. We met every single day at 12 noon and we strategised and worked out a plan for every single creditor and every single staff member of what we were going to do and how we were going to manage this unprecedented disaster.

“Surprisingly, at the end of the month, we had enough money to pay our staff and our creditors; but we went into April not knowing what we were going to do at the end of April but we were sure that we would find a way. Then what a relief, we went to Level 4 in the middle of April. At that stage, we could only sell cooking appliances and heaters and this we did – even though it wasn’t really cold yet, we sold them like there was no tomorrow,” she explained.

Margaret went on to explain they divided their staff members to alternate; however, one member still contracted the virus. “It was our Gauteng visual merchandiser who had been to all our stores in Gauteng – and so we literally had to close all the stores down,” she said.

From paying R10 000 to get their stores fogged, she said they cut costs by buying their own equipment to disinfect the stores.
From Level 3 to 2, productivity and sales went up as the Hirsch’s business was back to normal.

“We broke all records that we set the previous year and we were over 35 per cent higher than last year. These unprecedented times really helped us to get our business back on track and to make sure that we were there to service our customers. Customers felt that they could come to us because we were a trusted company and they knew that we would be there for them. Our online sales went up 438 per cent and at the moment we are trading extremely well and expecting a very good Christmas,” Margaret concluded.