Nearly a year after COVID shutdowns began in the Great White North, Canadians continue to grapple with business closures, stay-at-home restrictions and curfews as cases remain high and new, more-contagious variants first discovered overseas have appeared within its borders.

In a recent ASI Canada webinar, Sara Lavenduski, executive editor of digital content and editor of PromoGram Canada for ASI Media, spoke with four Canadians in the promotional products industry. Danny Braunstein, vice president of sales and business development at Talbot Promo (asi/341500) in Winnipeg; Amanda Dudek, owner of A Dudek Promotions (asi/101207) in Maple, ON; Kate Plummer, vice president of sales and marketing at Clearmount (asi/45440) in Scarborough, ON; and Paul Wieleba, owner of {WE} Promotional Advertising in London, ON, discussed how their businesses are faring in Q1 of 2021, and what they expect for the months to come.

Canadian executives discussed ongoing coronavirus challenges during the webinar; clockwise from top left: Danny Braunstein, Talbot Promo; Amanda Dudek, A Dudek Promotions; Paul Wieleba, {WE} Promotional Advertising; and Kate Plummer, Clearmount.

“It’s been interesting for my agency,” said Wieleba when asked about Q4 2020 and Q1 2021 sales numbers. “I had the biggest Q4 in all my years of selling. I was fortunate to work with great suppliers and my distributor partners were really engaged as well. Q1’s been a bit of a drop-off. The engagement’s still there but the size of orders has changed. They’re not quite as large in scale.”

Clearmount was poised to have one of its best years ever in early 2020, until a “steep drop-off” last March. This year is looking brighter.

“One of the nice things about awards is that they’re a cyclical project,” said Plummer. “A lot of jobs are locked in, and they’re going to keep going with them. What’s unique this year is the need for drop-shipping. We’re still down from last year, but award jobs are repeat jobs and those are the ones that are in-house.”

Talbot finished well at the end of 2020, with a sales drop of about 20% year over year. Now, in Q1, they’re down 32.4% from this time last year. “We attribute a lot of it to the lockdowns across the country,” said Braunstein. “It’s taken our legs out. But we’re still cautiously optimistic.”

Dudek runs a small home-based distributorship, so her clientele is made up of other smaller companies who’ve found this year very challenging. She said strict lockdowns in the Toronto-Peel region began anew in late Q4 when cases rose dramatically, and those onerous restrictions continue.

“The orders just weren’t there, and if they were there, they weren’t as large. That’s been a huge struggle,” she said. “My 2020 Q1 started fantastic. I was projecting to have a stellar year. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. I do find myself struggling to court new clients and try and keep the ones that I have. They just don’t have the needs that they did last year.”

Because of the long-term business suppression, the companies have had to find opportunity where they could. “The obvious [category] is PPE,” said Braunstein. “We’re fortunate we pivoted early on in that. … That made a huge difference in our year. We did about $4 million in PPE last year, which is a category we’d never been in before, and we didn’t understand, so it was a testament to our sales partners to learn something new and become experts in it.”

Work-from-home has become a booming new category too, Braunstein added. While PPE is already beginning to slow significantly, sales opportunities for remote workers “are here to stay,” he said. Kitting has also been huge for Talbot, particularly for virtual events. “I’m hopeful,” he said. “I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy.”

Dudek too jumped into PPE, and credits suppliers for being on the ball so quickly in the early days of the pandemic. The fun giveaways were gone because of a lack of events, but with a presence in the construction and property management markets, which stayed operative during the pandemic, she was able to help with uniform needs, like apparel, jackets and safety vests.

Looking ahead to the next few months, Wieleba said people are “cautiously optimistic,” and while the industry isn’t going away, it’s going to take a while to gradually build up again. As we progress through 2021, the fear of businesses closing will lessen.

“Last year, we were shut down,” he said. “People were transitioning to home, and it was one big mad scramble. Now that we’re living it, we know we can do these things, like drop-ship programs. It will continue to slowly build, and people will be more comfortable spending money.”

With all the uncertainty continuing, Plummer said people shouldn’t plan any more than three months ahead, if that, because so much can happen in the interim. As a committee member for Promotional Products Professionals of Canada’s (PPPC) Women’s Empowerment Event (WEE), she said they’re planning another virtual one for May. The earliest she’s heard of an in-person event is a small show in August, which she predicts will be canceled.

“Events are not going to come back in the way we think of them,” she said. “We need to start thinking about what works well in a digital event that we couldn’t do in-person, what do we want to carry over from an in-person event and what should we just stop missing because it’s not going to come back. Let’s start embracing what digital brings to our life. … It’s on us all to keep encouraging that positive thinking.”