Summer 2020 Textiles

Office Insight speaks to Mary­beth Shaw, Chief Cre­ative Offi­cer, Mar­ket­ing & Design, about her team’s expe­ri­ences and the tex­tile indus­try’s chal­lenges dur­ing the COVID-19 pandemic.

“At first, we looked at our port­fo­lio of bleach clean­able prod­ucts, and were real­ly focus­ing on the safe­ty aspect of all this,” Shaw said. ​“We also have a lot of woven tex­tiles that are use­ful as well. Now, we’ve had more time to under­stand and think more cre­ative­ly about the touch­points we have with our customers.”

“Cus­tomers are still very, very inter­est­ed in see­ing new prod­uct in any way you can get it to them. We’re doing a lot of vir­tu­al sales pre­sen­ta­tions now, mak­ing sure we’re being super respect­ful with the length and for­mat of those presentations.” 

The chal­lenges in get­ting face-time with cus­tomers and in get­ting sam­ples out has pre­sent­ed an oppor­tu­ni­ty for many com­pa­nies to fill out their dig­i­tal pres­ence. Wolf-Gor­don had for­tu­itous­ly rolled out a brand-new web­site in advance of the pan­dem­ic in February.

“Over this time, we’ve had sam­ple man­u­fac­tur­ers closed down, mills closed down and oth­er road blocks. But we’ve also been able to increase our social media pres­ence and focus more on all the ways we’re inter­act­ing dig­i­tal­ly with our customers.”

“I am a great believ­er in the ago­ra – in the get­ting togeth­er. We’re miss­ing Neo­Con and all of the oth­er events that bring us togeth­er phys­i­cal­ly. Those events are much more impor­tant than just a place and time to launch new prod­ucts. They’re impor­tant places where peo­ple come togeth­er and where mag­ic hap­pens, and I’m hop­ing we can get back there as soon as possible.”