Women of the Pandemic
Page 13
Over the next few months, Kaboré cemented her expansion plans. She booked fashion shows across the country, filling in the entire calendar year. She snapped up bundles of fabric and began growing her inventory. She even hired another seamstress to help meet demand and took first steps toward finding manufacturers in China. Closer to home, she signed up for a booth at the local farmers’ market, determined to bring both her culture and her style into the usually homogeneous space. She put out press releases and began to connect with others in her community. She had a strategy to drive traffic to her website, to transition out of her day job in 2021, and to begin paying herself a salary from her business by the end of the year. She would pay back her small business loan months ahead of time. By March, her ducks were in a neat, ambitious row, and Kaboré was excited about the months ahead. “And then, everything happened,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God. What am I going to do?’ ” Initially, she allowed herself to believe it would be a momentary setback—a month at most—and then reality would reassert itself. A month hadn’t passed, though, before all her carefully booked events began to cancel. “And now I’m just freaking out,” she said. The world had scrubbed a giant-sized eraser over her plans.
She had extra machines, fabric, supplies, and enough clothes to take to her next several scheduled shows and stock her website. She had bills. At least she also still had her job at the library. As that moved to work-from-home, however, Kaboré’s space started to feel decidedly un-Marie-Kondo-like. Both her home office and her home inventory had to be shoved inside one space. She was often physically in the middle, trying to traverse through—a metaphor for her possible career paths, frustrations, and fears brought to life. Kaboré’s first step, after the shock, was to try and cater to demand. Drawing on her public health expertise, she started sewing cheerful face masks and selling them on the KYN Apparel website. It helped bring in sales, but not as much cash flow as she needed. She reluctantly explored further loan options, but—at least intially—ultimately decided she didn’t want to become one of the many small businesses that sank further into the red during the pandemic. In July, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) estimated that three-quarters of small businesses had taken on extra debt to keep afloat, totalling a depressing $117 billion. On average, each business added $135,000 to its debt, with business owners relying on personal savings, credit cards, bank loans, and retirement savings (in that order). By mid-September, only 18 per cent of businesses in Alberta were at or above normal revenues, though 65 per cent of them had reopened.
Even if she had decided to incur more debt during the early months of the pandemic, Kaboré isn’t sure she would have been successful at doing so. She didn’t have much luck finding grants or other funding, either, despite dedicated searching. There just wasn’t anything out there—or if there was, she didn’t have access to it. “In the business world, there is segregation,” she said. “The men are getting the most of the pie, and when it comes to women, the white women are getting more than the Black women.” (In fact, in recognition of this, Justin Trudeau announced a $221 million funding program in September 2020 to help Black business owners and entrepreneurs access funding and capital, as well as loans and other services.) Kaboré also worried that closing her business would be the equivalent of staking a flashing neon WARNING! sign, complete with not-so-fine print: Don’t Try. How many other Black women who’d been thinking about starting a business would see that she’d shut down and decide not to take the risk themselves? She worried the answer might be “a lot,” and that unknowable number weighed on her. She knew failure wasn’t singular; it rippled out. But planning seemed impossible when the future was edged in ambiguity. The only thing she could do, she decided, was take it day by day—and hope the pandemic would fade before she tripped over the precipice.
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Saschie MacLean-Magbanua dreamed people would miss her studio so much that when she reopened in June they’d rush back, ready to dance away the pandemic stress. That isn’t exactly what happened. Her first month back at Formation, the ultra-cool white-and-concrete space she’d opened in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood at the end of 2019, was quiet. In part, that was because she’d reduced her 230-square-metre studio capacity by 65 per cent to help keep people safe. Instead of the thirty-five classes a week she ran in March—drawing up to a total of eight hundred people—she was now holding between fifteen and seventeen hours of class. But MacLean-Magbanua knew it wasn’t the only reason her once-bustling studio felt subdued. Many people didn’t yet feel comfortable sweating and shouting next to others, no matter the social distance. Some didn’t feel comfortable leaving their house. Others likely could no longer afford the class. Or maybe they didn’t know Formation had reopened. It didn’t help that MacLean-Magbanua had chosen her location to draw in commuters and office folk, a move that felt like a score when there were still offices open for people to go to. Now the city was eerily empty, foot traffic defeated to zilch. She’d seen her class numbers rise each week, but still wondered if the trickle would be enough to sustain the business she’d poured her heart into.
MacLean-Magbanua hadn’t always planned to open a dance studio; she isn’t a dancer by training. But in 2014, her seventeen-year-old younger sister was in a fatal car accident, mere weeks before MacLean-Magbanua’s twenty-sixth birthday. Shocked with grief, she retreated into herself. She spent weeks on her couch, watching-but-not-watching endless seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, eating barbecue chips, quiet and still. During this time, MacLean-Magbanua was also seeing a grief counsellor who, one day, suggested she try moving her body every now and then, if she could. It would be good for her, the therapist coaxed. It might help her find some balance through the instability of loss. So when she saw a friend announce on Instagram that he was teaching an all-Beyoncé dance class, she decided to go. She was immediately surprised by the joy it gave her. The empowering, badass beats, moving to the choreography—it all helped to give her a welcome break from her own head. Her then-boyfriend, and now husband and business partner, suggested that she organize her own casual class, just her and a few friends having a blast and dancing to nothing but Beyoncé songs. MacLean-Magbanua was eager to revisit the sense of peace she had found through dance. She announced a drop-in class, expecting a few friends who felt obligated to come. Instead, the class was over capacity. “And it really snowballed from there,” she said.
For the next few years, she ran drop-in classes three times a week in Vancouver, and hosted pop-ups in Calgary and Toronto under the name RSVP 33. Many of the people who attended the class were beginner dancers, or hadn’t stepped into a studio since they were kids. MacLean-Magbanua welcomed all levels of experience. For her, the classes’ ethos wasn’t so much about perfecting the moves—although clients certainly learned new skills—but about providing a space where people could feel empowered, silly, sexy, or whatever else they needed to feel in that particular moment. She wanted them to feel safe enough, and supported enough, to unlock something in their bodies: grief, trauma, happiness, loss. She wanted them to have fun. Throughout RSVP 33’s rapid organic growth, she kept her day job in tourism communications and marketing, working full-time right up until she decided to open a permanent studio and rebrand as Formation. By February, her new business had started to hit its groove. She was looking forward to March. Within a week of the month’s start, however, an uneasy, anxious feeling thrummed through the city. MacLean-Magbanua remembers looking at the studio’s schedule on Wednesday, March 11. Every day straight through Monday was booked solid. And then on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, more people started dropping off, one by one, leaves in autumn. On Monday, March 16, MacLean-Magbanua ran her usual 7 a.m. class, not yet knowing it would be the last one.
After the class, she and her husband went out for coffee to chat about what they should do. Everything felt eerie and possibly unsafe. Their province hadn’t yet announced a state of emergency, but neither one w
anted to put their employees or their clients in danger. They’d stocked the studio with hand sanitizer and encouraged people to wash their hands. But nobody could tell them if they had done enough because nobody knew. Like many others, they felt stuck in limbo, collecting more questions than answers. And so, that morning, they decided to shut down the studio. It felt wrong to keep it open, pretending there was no risk. MacLean-Magbanua felt relieved to have finally made a decision, and it also broke her heart. She had no idea if she’d scrape together enough cash to keep paying rent. Her team didn’t qualify for EI because they hadn’t been open long enough, and at the time, they had no idea if extra aid was coming—or if their employees would qualify for it. When she locked the doors that day, she didn’t know when, or if, she’d ever reopen them again for her clients. “Truthfully, the future is unclear for us,” she wrote in a graceful Instagram post announcing the closure. “This is not a time to panic, it is a time for us all to take responsibility, stay grounded, and do our part.”
For the first few weeks of the lockdown, MacLean-Magbanua was, as she puts it, “an emotional disaster.” Everything that was spinning around the world—the shock, trauma, grief—was also a tornado inside of her, every bad headline a new piece of debris. But in between journalling and becoming a Bon Appétit superfan, MacLean-Magbanua was also working hard to help her business make it through. Like many fitness studio owners, she and her husband crafted a plan to try online classes. They had already invested in film equipment and, after brief inertia, moved quickly to film their instructors inside the studio, creating a vault of footage; luckily, the space was big enough to do it safely. In addition to building a digital content library, MacLean-Magbanua also chose to offer regular free live video classes, something she kept up for months, including after reopening in June. She wanted her instructors to have an opportunity to work. She also figured people just needed to dance. She didn’t want to hoard such a powerful healing tool, one that had anchored her when she thought it was impossible. “Even if you’re not in the same room, you’re collectively creating energy for your space,” she said. “It was like we were all still together.” And, in a time of crushing isolation, that counted for a lot.
By far her biggest emotional challenge was not worrying what would happen to Formation itself, but what would happen to her team. MacLean-Magbanua had the foresight to make her instructors staff employees, not contractors, unlike many in the fitness industry—meaning, they’d be eligible for support they otherwise might not have received. In the early chaotic days, though, that support was like having a wish without a genie’s lamp. She felt an overwhelming, suffocating responsibility right up until the start of CERB, which she and her husband also accessed. Relief for her business didn’t come until much later. When it was first launched on April 9, the Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) program had an applicant threshold of $50,000 in payroll in 2019. As a new business, MacLean-Magbanua couldn’t meet it. When it later dropped to $25,000, she was finally able to access the interest-free loan program, which offers small businesses and non-profits up to $40,000. By October 2020, more than 750,000 businesses had received CEBA loans, totalling $30.24 billion. A $5,000 grant from Bumble (yes, the dating app) had kept MacLean-Magbanua going until then. She felt fortunate for the cash, even if, in June, she still wasn’t sure what her future held.
Already, many fellow business owners in her network had made the difficult decision to close permanently. Driving down the street where Formation is located, she’d see a checkerboard of dark storefronts. Each one was a lost livelihood, a vanished community, the culmination of someone’s hustle and hard work and creativity suddenly gone. She sometimes wondered if she would join them.
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Spring 2020 wasn’t all shuttered windows and red ink: threaded through all the loss and hardship, business owners found jewels of community, generosity, and ingenuity. Some also found belonging. Along with her husband and their three children, Sarah Taher moved to Fredericton, New Brunswick, from Dubai at the end of June 2019. The family is Muslim and originally from Egypt; they left both places because, as Taher put it, “We wanted a place we can call home.” The family applied to move to Canada under New Brunswick’s immigration program—although, Taher admitted, she had never before heard of the province itself. It wasn’t a happy welcoming. Really, she didn’t feel welcome at all. Fredericton’s lack of racial and cultural diversity shocked her; it felt like she had arrived on a completely different planet. (The 2016 census shows that visible minorities comprise less than 10 per cent of Fredericton’s population.) She felt like she, and her hijab, had popped the Maritime town’s white, isolated bubble. The only friends she was able to make were other Egyptian immigrants, other people who looked just like her. One of them apologetically told her, “Don’t try to be friends with Canadians. They will never like you.” A man in the supermarket yelled right in her face, “Ignorant mountain girl!” She thought: What is that? She thought: Will I ever fit in? She was depressed and lonely, an outsider in the place she wanted to call home.
Both Taher and her husband are engineers. After her arrival in Canada, Taher eventually got a job working from home as an SEO specialist for a Toronto-based company. She enjoyed it, but she had always wanted to start her own business. An idea for what it could be had started forming even before she moved to Canada: she wore custom-made hijabs; she could make beautiful, unique head coverings for others, too. She’d always wanted to learn how to sew and had vowed to cross it off her bucket list after moving to Fredericton. As she planned her new business and dodged closed-minded attitudes, she also started taking sewing lessons, watching online tutorials, and practising with her own machine and materials. In January, she felt skilled enough to open her own business, Sufeya, selling handmade scrunchies and hijabs both online and in person at the city’s Northside Market. There, she finally started to feel like she was part of something. A florist at a nearby booth helped Taher on her first day, showed her to her table, and kindly and patiently answered all of her questions. Taher had also started a blog to process and share her experiences with discrimination in Canada. Readers started to visit her, buying silky, colourful hijabs—even if they weren’t Muslim, even if they never planned to wear them.
Two months later, COVID-19 couldn’t interrupt Taher’s burgeoning sense of community. In fact, against all odds, it accelerated its progress. Forced away from the market, Taher, like Kaboré, looked at her leftover cotton material and decided to begin making masks. She was surprised when they were an immediate hit. “I’ve sold hundreds,” she told me in July, just a few weeks after her one-year anniversary in Canada. “I’ve stopped counting, actually.” She’d wake up early, spend a couple of hours making masks, work a six-hour shift for her day job, then spend time with her family. She dedicated most of her weekends to sewing, finishing one mask every ten minutes—she could now probably do it blindfolded, she joked. While she shipped her masks all over the country, she also sold plenty locally, both directly to customers and through local vendors. Working with the latter to buy fabric supplies, sell her finished product, and coordinate prize giveaways only widened her network. Her husband often delivered the masks himself, driving around Fredericton, dropping them off and saying hello. “I started to actually like the place,” she said. “I thought, ‘I can be part of this. People are starting to give me a chance. They’re getting to know me.’ ” In the middle of a pandemic, both sides were starting to build trust.
This kind of community echoed throughout the country. People encouraged each other to buy local, to order every week from their favourite restaurants, to purchase monthly passes and yearlong memberships to small gyms and studios that they couldn’t go to. In return, many restaurants and other shops donated food and supplies to frontline efforts, to homeless populations, to anyone who needed it. Thousands joined Taher, Kaboré, and MacLean-Magbanua in getting creative and pivoting their business, whether by adopti
ng new practices, making entirely new products, or both. Plenty of designers started crafting masks. Distilleries began making hand sanitizer. Restaurants assembled meal kits and picnic baskets. Gyms and fitness studios across Canada moved their classes online and into living rooms. Consultants, instructors, and therapists alike offered video sessions. Musicians streamed concerts. Indeed, on the whole, women-owned businesses were more likely to enact changes during the initial months of the pandemic. Over half of them introduced new ways to interact with or sell to customers. And more than one-third modified their products or services—compared to just over one-quarter of all businesses in Canada. In other words: they got creative so they could survive.
Unfortunately, in many cases, it simply wasn’t enough. In Toronto, seventy-seven-year-old Frances Wood was one of the many restaurant owners to call it quits. After nearly forty years, she closed her famous Cajun-and-Creole spot, Southern Accent, in April, which had served everyone from Helen Mirren to the Rolling Stones. The closure curtailed several decades’ worth of plans to sell the restaurant and use the profit for her retirement; she told media that her future “doesn’t look good.” By the end of June, about 40 per cent of women-owned businesses were forced to lay off employees, and more than 30 per cent had to reduce staff hours. What’s more, nearly two-thirds of those who did lay off workers sent pink slips to 80 per cent of their staff. Women also account for almost 40 per cent of self-employed Canadians; many of them rely on contractors, not employees, to run their business. Both factors put the majority of government support programs out of their reach (something that was true even before the pandemic). On top of that, small and medium-sized enterprises with under twenty employees—the type of business women are more likely to own—suffered disproportionately more revenue loss than larger companies with over one hundred employees. More women business owners reported being unable to pay their rent or mortgage payments, and more women reported being denied payment deferrals. In other words, while many businesses and entrepreneurs buckled under the mass shutdowns, for women the economic story was gloomier and more complicated.