In March 2020, COVID-19 began spreading rapidly across the United States, and cities and states began issuing 'stay-at-home' orders to all non-essential workers and businesses. This meant nearly every small local business owner saw their revenue go to zero. I was living in downtown Chicago at the time and had a friend of a friend who was the director of the Lincoln Square Chamber of Commerce. Given the 'stay-at-home' orders prevented people and shops from gathering, the Chamber was going to have to cancel their annual Square Roots Festival, a three-day street fest that brought $1 million to the small businesses in the neighborhood each year.
The challenge
How could we help small businesses stay open, serve patrons, collect revenue, and help the community maintain a vital piece of it's culture and revenue during COVID lockdown?
The approach
The goal was very simple but not without it's logistical challenges.
We need to have a single central digital site to direct traffic, showcase the businesses and products, and collect orders
Each business that participated in the street festival needed to be able to sell its own products with their own product photos and listing descriptions and at the price of their choosing
The Lincoln Square Chamber of Commerce needed to be able to collect a fee from each of the sales of the products to cover the cost of organizing and promoting the event to its network.
Local patrons and customers needed to be able to visit the site, browse and search the products, add products from different shops to their cart, checkout once and have an itemized list of all of their purchases for pickup or delivery
As a central organizer, we needed to be able to process payments securely, charge customers for the total of their purchases, and organize and execute the correct disbursements of funds to the shops as well as to the Chamber.
Each business needed to be able to receive their orders, collect their revenue earned, and make accommodations to deliver or have customers pick up their orders in a timely manner.
We needed to build a multi merchant marketplace oversight.
The result
Square Roots 2020 was online!
We spun up an e-commerce site complete with cart management, checkout, and payment processing via Webflow.
We ended up having more than 40 small businesses around Lincoln Square participate. Each sent in photos and a list of the products they wished to sell.
We created landing pages for each business, complete with product listings, product descriptions, and photos of each of their items
We had a branded site complete with logo, font, color palette, and background videos provided by the Lincoln Square Chamber of Commerce and matching the Square Roots Festival theme.
We live-streamed the Square Roots concert that would have taken place on stage in-person and enabled viewers to donate to the Lincoln Square Chamber of Commerce while they watched the concert.
This challenge was not unique to Lincoln Square. Small businesses across the country were struggling. I was sitting on a domain at the time that I had bought on account of my two year old son loving to say the word 'bach-a-laash'. His eyes would light up every time he uttered it in a eureka type expression. We were off and running.
In total, we ended up helping dozens of additional neighborhoods around Chicago launch and run virtual street festivals during the COVID lockdown. We also helped drive more than $250,000 to small local businesses in and around Chicago in 2020.
