Recently, we had to visit Mitchell and Skye Cohen at Economy Candy to learn about the history of their business and how WooCommerce uses. While our team was in New York, we also filmed a short interview that you can see below or on our YouTube channel. Do you want the whole story? Continue reading for all sweet, sweet details of their success. 🍬🍭
Please note that some quotations have been modified for clarity and brevity.
The economic candy began at the age of 30 as a Penny Sweets trolley in front of a repair shoe and hats in New York.
Since then, three generations of Cohen family have changed the company in the lower east – with the corner of Rivington and Essex, named after Mitchell’s grandfather – and the national distributor of goodies from around the world. Now Mitchell Cohen and his wife Skye Greenfield Cohen continue this link.
“Beginning before he could see over the counter, Mitchell worked with his father behind the register standing on the milk boxes, noticed the accounts, and calculated the change in his head,” Skye shared.
Skye also continued her important tradition: ensuring that her husband continues the family business, as well as Mitchell’s mother and grandmother did for her husbands.
Their latest development included an improved e-commerce strategy in March 2020. When they reworked their website, which fortunately happened in time to close Covid-19, also updated their business operations.
Economy Candy brought nearly 2,500 SK to her online store, lively synchronized inventory management and began using a combination of transport and local pickup options to make their business (and their customers happy) through the pandemic and beyond.
- Family business since 1937.
- From push trolley to national transport.
- In 2023 it reached almost 10,000 online transactions.
- Their website represents 20 to 25% of annual sales each year.
- Live inventory synchronization of almost 2,500 SKU.
Candy’s economy has been important around the world and local disasters in their 88 -year history, yet they are still strong. Their permanent presence is largely due to their obligation to their customers and maintains the availability of their products in all difficult times.
Over the past five years, they have added nearly 500 new products to their inventory – which now boasts stunning 2,500 different sweets and goodies.
However, obtaining 2,500 SKU required surgical pivot: all their inventory operations used exclusively in Mitchell’s brain.
“Until the pandemic, all Economy Candy inventory was stored in Mitchell’s head,” Skye shared. “Our employees had to remember the prices of all more than 2,000 items we wore because we were still using stupid cash registers, where the price of each item had to be entered manually. In 2021 we made a jump to the 21st century and upgraded to square digital registers.”
Their modernization coincided with the pandemic, which irritated the need for effective (and online) inventory management. It is not allowed to bring employees in the store, Mitchell and Skye to move all the sale online and managed to fill themselves.
In 2021, they added square digital registers and implemented barcode scanning using the Thrive to synchronize sales in shops with an electronic store.
The economic candy has been online since the dawn of the millennium. When hunting a solution that did not feel limited by functionality or growth, they changed the platforms several times until 2015 – when they found WooCommerce.
“When we were introduced to us WooCommerce, it was clear that the restriction would no longer be a problem. Because wooocommerce is open source, there is no ceiling. There is no limit to what you can do, what you can customize, what you can create.
—Skye Greenfield Cohen, co -owner, Economy Candy
Their WooCommerce trade is responsible for 20 to 25% of their total sales every year, and seasonal tips are in operation around the holidays.
Easy to control the complexity
The Thrive is among other third -party tools WooCommerce and Economy Candy’s Third Party and synchronizes sales for shopping in stores, online transactions and Shipstation. They also integrated the website with UPS, FedEx, Route, Mailchimp, Google and Meta. With a total of 57 active plugins and custom code, Economy Candy manages a comprehensive network of tools and services.
“It is incredible that WooCommerce is able to talk to all these different programs.”
—Skye Greenfield Cohen, co -owner, Economy Candy
Adaptation and candy go hand in hand
One aspect that Mitchell and Skye love about WooCommerce is the width of adaptation options – something that is useful when your products can melt during warmer seasons: “Chocolate transport in summer is difficult.
“(For example) I can set a warning,” Skye said, “for anything that is chocolate, put this text on this page so that the person who ordered it knows that it is chocolate, there is a risk of melting.
Their focus on customer satisfaction was the key to their success: “The economic candy survived for almost 90 years on oral,” Skye shared. “What means” oral word “, of course, has changed a bit in the last century, from literally to now to now, including our customers will publish about us on Tiktoku and Instagram and we have the presence of social media.”
To inspire this organic promotion, they monitor the rule of three: if three people provide the same feedback or request, they do everything they are in their power to meet it. This often affects their decisions on products and supplies, from the import of international sweets to ensuring that they store candies from the oldest customers.
Do they occupy a similar approach to decisions on new products, given the customer’s point of view: would the customer be excited to see him in the store, or someone asked for something similar? Is it a unique product they haven’t seen before?
Mitchell and Skye also remember future generations of their audience. Their employees gene help them to maintain an overview of the trends of tiktok and viral sweets, such as Swedish candies, lyophilized candy and mucilage licking.
As the company grows, economic candies continue to play on the strengths of WooCommerce. The use of all Mitchell and Skye adaptation options know they can change the direction whenever they need it.
“Being able to turn without restoring your site from scratch every few years, which we have used to – now we are making improvements on an existing platform instead of starting from scratch, saving a lot of money, a lot of time.”
-Mitchell Cohen, co -owner, economic candy
“With WooCommerce as the central support of our platform and adding pieces around it… Economycandy.com is adapted to what Economiccandy.com must be for customers of confectionery economics and economics to work on backend.
Vanessa spent her career writing useful things for people all over the technology space. In addition to work, she likes training on triathlon, through hobbies and examines new places in urban and natural places. It has two fluffy cats, keeps several succulents and has too many books on its shelf TBR.