From Crisis to Opportunity: A Chamber's Rapid Response

Jena Potter : We're going to host a marketplace in two weeks for you guys to at least liquidate this stuff. But you know, we're trying to meet you in the gap as your Chamber of Commerce. And she said, “Well, that may give me the strength to go on, because right now I feel hopeless. Like no one's here to help us and I just don't know what to do.

” Amanda Ellis : That's the voice of Jena Potter, VP of Marketing & Communications at Williamson, Inc., she’s here today sharing how this Chamber moved quickly and made a real impact when local small businesses faced a crisis. When dozens of Painted Trees across the country suddenly closed, chaos ensued, but so did an opportunity for the local Chamber to make a difference. Keep listening for the full story of what happened next.

Welcome or welcome back to Inside America’s Best Cities. I’m Amanda Ellis of Livability Media, your partner for telling cool community stories like this one, attracting talent and getting your place in front of the right people. At Livability, we highlight the nation's most vibrant small and mid-sized cities so relocating talent and business decision-makers glean the insights they need. And with that, let’s jump in.

Amanda Ellis : Welcome, Jena, officially, to Inside America's Best Cities. We're super excited to cover a very fun case study today. Jena Potter : I'm very excited to talk about it. Thank you, Amanda.

Amanda Ellis : So what we're here to chat about, and I'm gonna let you kind of fill in the fun parts, but a lot of people may be familiar with the brand called Painted Tree, which was a retail chain that was, you know, kind of large locations where individual vendors could have booths. Right? And there was an active location in Franklin, where you're based, and they closed kind of without notice and left a lot of people hanging. So I'd love to have you, like, fill in that story a little bit more with anything we should add.

Jena Potter : Yeah. So 61 locations nationwide is what we've been told. All of them experienced bankruptcy at once. No warning other than, you know, that, that moment, that if those businesses did not get their product out of there, each landlord was in control of what that kind of looked like and if it could be part of the bankruptcy, so.

The Painted Tree was the point of sale for these businesses. So in Franklin, that was 311 businesses and 275 booths, 33 employees, and 67,000 square feet of space. So you think about 67,000 square feet of space and product, and they're all having to move that out. And also, listeners may be wondering, when I say 311 businesses, that's because they had an art gallery, they had kiosks.

So they did have 275 booth spaces that had businesses. But then it also, the art gallery and the kiosks. Amanda Ellis : Gotcha. So how did you initially hear about all this?

And kind of put two and two together of like, “oh, we have one of those. This isn't… this isn't good.” Jena Potter : Well, one, I was a shopper. Love their products.

A very diverse place. Great place for gifts, locally made. But the way that we heard about it, actually. So this.

It happened on a Tuesday that they received the email about midday. One of the tenants there actually says she thought that the manager, one of his family members, had passed away because he was so emotional going around to the booths. Jena Potter : They even told us that they had a. They announced that they had a gas leak to get customers out of there.

Because they were actively buying product and it was being absolved into the bankruptcy. So it was really like robbing these businesses of their product if you could purchase right then. Amanda Ellis : Right. Sorry.

It's not funny. Jena Potter : It's not. Amanda Ellis : It’s so bad that it's a little funny. Jena Potter : It's.

Yeah. But honestly, the sense of community around the management team and the staff and the fact that they cared enough to be like, oh, my God, how can we stop people from buying products without causing, you know, mass. Well, I guess it is chaos because if you say there's a gas leak, I guess everyone's watching for the door. Amanda Ellis : But different kind of chaos.

Jena Potter : Yeah, yeah. So the email went out on a Tuesday. We started seeing it circulate in Facebook groups probably late afternoon, early Thursday morning. And everyone on our team that saw it was like, “where can we step in here?

Obviously, we're a Chamber of Commerce.” To give you some context, Williamson Inc. is 1400 members, 90% of which are small businesses. And we were like, “These are our people.

” How can we get our arms around them? So Thursday morning is when I called our leadership team and I was like, hey, what if we were to do free membership for a year? Because it doesn't really cost us anything to just give them the membership, especially them being displaced. They're going to need the resources, right?

We were like, okay, well, how can we further support them? Let's do a marketplace. And so at this time, it was one day, and that was at 11am I called our events team leader, Stacy, and said, “hey, could you get us in with the Factory,” which is our largest venue space in the county, for a marketplace to support the Painted Tree? She said, “yeah, I'm on it.

I'm actually headed that way after this ribbon cutting.” And she was cutting a ribbon at like 11:30, and I think by 11:40, she was in the car on the way to the factory. Right. By 12:30, she calls me.

Jena Potter : She said, yeah, we can be under contract on May 4, which was. I think it gave us two weeks to market it. Wow. And I said, okay, I've already started on branding and comms and press releases, and I've met with some media partners to start getting this ball rolling.

So that's. It all came together probably Thursday afternoon. We were set to do the release and everything. And then Friday morning, we thought, okay, we can't just make this announcement.

We don't really have any current members. We also don't have a contact list of these businesses. So myself and Katie, who manages our social media, met with an influencer weeks prior who had been covering this. She kind of advocates for small businesses in our county, and we have a lot of the same clients.

And I called her and I said, we want to go to Painted Tree tomorrow. And, you know, we're going to host this marketplace, but we want to have conversations with the people first before we just, you know, say we're doing this and kind of get a feel for what's going on and how we can help and if there's anything that we should pivot or innovate, you know, to meet their needs in a better way. And so we went, we got there at like 11am and so I told you, it was announced on Tuesday.

This is 11am on Friday. Jena Potter : 80% vacant. I mean, it look apocalyptic in there.And if you've never been in a Painted Tree, the tenants are responsible for the build out of their booth space.

So, I mean, high quality light fixtures. We have a woman that has become a great Chamber member now, Donna. She actually goes by Francesca when she's in her boutique space. But she does all Italian imports from food.

Food to clothing to jewelry. And she had built a wine window 12 foot tall to pass Prosecco samples out while people shopped. And so there were so many unique build-outs in there. She pulled her wine window out and took it with her, put it in her garage.

Amanda Ellis : So was the idea to go and engage with some of the vendors to get involved with the market, but then a lot, not a lot of them were there? Jena Potter : Well, so that's fascinating. You say that there were still people there. I would say for every one booth that was trying to get things out, there were five other business owners helping that person wheel things out, get their product out.

We quickly found out that people were in multiple locations. Some people were in five, six, up to 30 different locations across the U.S. so you imagine getting that call on a Tuesday, and you've got to think about storage, you've got to think about moving your product, calling a mover, the cost you're incurring alone.

And then they had paid rent for April, so then they've lost their April rent. They also hadn't been paid for what they had sold the previous month or anything in April. So that's all just lost product. Because the Painted Tree was their point of sale.

The Pantry was getting 10% of the sale and then giving them a payout a month or two later. Amanda Ellis : I wasn’t even thinking about what you're saying, about multiple locations. I assumed that each location was local, but if that's not the case, that's even a whole other layer. Jena Potter : We even had someone talk about one of their neighbors.

I didn't directly get to meet her, but she was for $40,000 in loans for a children's boutique that she had just opened three months prior. Because this business model had done so well for other people doing clothing boutiques, gifts, it just… Yeah. Amanda Ellis : Okay, so you're saying you, you went there, made some contacts that way, met with an influencer to kind of build out this list of getting people to participate? Jena Potter : And that's when I had the conversation with Donna that I was referencing earlier.

And I said, well, what, what are your next steps? And looking back at it, I'm like, why would I even ask that? She's three days into a tragedy. I mean, just having her whole business ripped out from under her.

Amanda Ellis : Right. Jena Potter : A lot of these people have products in their guest rooms, living rooms, garages. So it was, it was an emotional time, really. And that's when I thought to myself, okay, we're going to do this marketplace.

And I'd already told her in the conversation, we're going to host a marketplace in two weeks for you guys to at least liquidate this stuff if you, when you can. But you know, we're trying to meet you in the gap as your Chamber of Commerce. And she said, well, that may give me the strength to go on, because right now I feel hopeless. Like no one's here to help us and I just don't know what to do.

And in that moment I was like, okay, we've got to do this for two days. We can't ask them to pack all their products and build their little booths back out and then pack it all out that evening. Like, can we just do it for two days so they can pack it in that morning and then pack it out the next day? So we called the factory as soon as we got out of there and they said, sure.

Amanda Ellis : Right. What comments would you have? Because I feel like sometimes Chambers can be not necessarily the most nimble. Like it takes a minute to like, make a decision, get everybody on board.

But you didn't really have the luxury of time in this situation. Cause you were like, if we're going to do this, like it's happening. So how were you able, you know, to move that along? And what advice would you have for people that, you know, need to make that happen sometimes?

Jena Potter : Yeah, yeah. So it really comes down to your team and how much you care. And there were evenings where I did not, you know, 12 hour days, you know, and, and our team, I, I think too, we're not five days in the office. We're a hybrid model.

And there were afternoons where I would work on this, you know, 8, 9, 10 o'clock. But it's, when you're meeting a need like that, it just fills your cup to keep you going also having a team that will say yes and kind of just get into that kind of mode. Our events team, they were on it, whatever we needed done for this. And then our leadership team too had the understanding of, okay, we can for two weeks, two and a half weeks, we can set aside some things and make this a priority.

Now, were we behind on event marketing for a couple little other things? A little bit, yeah. But to be honest, the spotlight of this almost compensated for that because then people wanted to engage with us more. So it paid us back, you know, and I think just being prepared for that kind of impact too financially was very beneficial for us.

Amanda Ellis : Right, right. So it was kind of like put you a little behind on some other things you could figure out later. But then honestly, the extra, you know, PR benefit of helping the community in that way just kind of evened everything out? Jena Potter : Well, just all the earned media that came from it.

You know, we, we don't have a marketing budget that is robust by any means. And so we don't pay for a lot of media exposure. And three local news stations did multiple airings of this before and after or before and during. And so it helped us reach a group of people that we had not reached before.

And also as a Chamber, you think about yourselves as this B2B organization. Right. We're all just trying to connect the businesses. That's not always the case.

We're also trying to connect the B2C. We host other marketplaces and other expos and this helped us reach more consumers which in the long run, now that we have, we collected their emails as they were coming in the door, will be able to get them back to other marketplaces which will benefit not only the Painted Tree displaced vendors, but it'll also benefit our other members as they display it at other marketplaces. Amanda Ellis : Right. And really a way to kind of be that community glue that a lot of Chambers like talk about that they are.

Right. But how are you actually showing that in a moment of need versus being like, “oh, that wasn't in the budget, that wasn't in the plan. Good luck to you guys.” Jena Potter : Well, and you think about these businesses.

We did an exit survey. 67 businesses out of the 311 were able to participate and we did it on a Monday and Tuesday. So some of these people have full time jobs and that's why the paint tree was such an appeal to them because it allowed them to have full time jobs. So 67 were able to participate.

We did the exit survey and it was nearly 60% of them had no idea who we were before this. So just a group of business owners finding out who we are and what we're able to provide to them. I mean, that's worth its weight in gold. Amanda Ellis : Right.

So tell me a little more about the event itself. So you did two days at the factory, which for people who aren't local to your area is kind of like an upscale retail thing with event space as well. Is that a good way to describe it? Jena Potter : Yep, that is exactly it.

Amanda Ellis : So two days on Monday and Tuesday you said, and they were just able to come in, set up and you were able to market it for people to come in and do some shopping to support? Jena Potter : Yeah, so we did it, we opened. Let's see, the actual operating hours of the Marketplace were from 10:00am to 8:00pm, which was the operating hours of the Painted Tree. Amanda Ellis : I love that too, because you gave some after hours time for people that… Jena Potter : Yeah, well, and they're traditional clients.

Those, you know, they were also looking to reconnect with their customers because also not having control of the point of sale, not collecting emails, then your entire storefront's gone. You can't hardly connect with your, you know, unless they're following you on social media. You don't have, you know, someone working your booth, constantly connecting with your customers. So creating that space for them to reconnect was, was very impactful for them.

And in the survey they all said that as well. Amanda Ellis : Right. Jena Potter : So yeah, back to your question around the actual agenda of it. So we did that at 8, they were able to come in at 6am to set up.

I got there at probably 5:30 and someone was already there ready to, you know, because. So to alleviate the lift on our team, because our events team is really two, three people to alleviate some of the workload, we did first come, first serve on booths. And so the earlier you got there you could get whatever space you want. And you know, that way we weren't having to do like an actual arranged chart.

And I will say this being a crisis response, everyone was so grateful. There really wasn't any issue with, well, I wanted this space or, you know… Amanda Ellis : Why didn't you do this?! Jena Potter : Right. So the sense of gratitude alleviated any type of issue that you probably would see a Chamber have with that kind of setup with a paid marketplace.

Amanda Ellis : Yeah. And like that it was put together fairly quickly. Like normally you'd have this plan for longer, you'd do a lot more marketing and planning and logistics and obviously you can't expect the same result in two to three weeks as in something that's been planned for a year that you have every year type thing. Jena Potter : I would say that this definitely outperformed any market that we've had, though.

So, again, I keep getting off of the actual how the day went. 8am was when the marketplace, or no, 10am was when the market was supposed to open. But what we did at 9am was a ribbon cutting. And when we first talked about this, we were like, should we do it?

And I was like, yeah, we should. Let's get all 67 of these businesses on the stage. And we had the two general managers of the Painted Tree come, and they were actually the ones that cut the ribbon. And they were able to, you know, say a few words because they had worked with these people for years.

Jena Potter : And the amount of tears and friendship that we had seen, you know, in visiting with them prior and that morning, it just made so much sense to have the general manager managers do that. So we were able to, you know, kind of talk about, well, you know, you may have thought you lost your community, but you've gained one. And so we had our members there, our elected officials. It was a great way for these 67 businesses that are now all new Chamber members too, because you've got to think we gave them a year of Chamber membership.

This is their intro to the Chamber. And so it, it was such a great feeling. So that was at 9:00am, one of our local news stations came and moved their morning show there and did a live broadcast of it all. So that was great.

Um, and then for the next two days, we were… we were there. Amanda Ellis : Right, right. Well, from a media result standpoint, from what you were talking about, I mean, it's like the perfect example there, right? Because it's, it's like such a good story on its own.

You don't even have to, you know what I mean, try that hard to frame it. It's just a really good story that tells itself and it's like a positive feel good spin on something negative. And so that's pretty cool. Especially speaking to kind of like a limited marketing budget, which a lot of Chambers are dealing with.

Right? And just trying to get creat creative within that. It's just a perfect example. Jena Potter : Yeah, yeah, it was.

And adding on an influencer, which I actually would like to back up and say content creator. She let me know that they prefer that term. As a Chamber of Commerce. We've never used a content creator.

And I don't know many Chambers that have, to be honest. And so, you know, this could be probably a whole ‘nother podcast. And if you know anyone that's using one, I would love to know, because were starting this kind of theme of getting them together. I met with a company last week and they were talking about how much they lean on content creators.

And he said it's a $40 billion industry and it's expected to double in the next few years. And I thought that's… That's business. That's us, you know, and as a Chamber, we need to kind of innovate and pivot and draw our arms around these people too. And so that's when we started working with Jessie, because her whole thing is hidden gems in Franklin.

And so she finds small businesses and gets them in front of people. And so doing the announcement with the about the marketplace with her, our average view on Instagram reels is like a couple grand, maybe on a good day. This was over 150,000. 97% weren't even following us.

Hundreds of new followers for us. Engagement has been consistently up since. So there's really something to this whole local influencer thing. Amanda Ellis : Right, Right.

Well, I'd love to get her, that creator’s like, where people can follow her and find her. Just as a good example of the types of local people to look out for that you might be able to partner with, because I think you're right. It's definitely a good way to extend the reach Chambers maybe haven't fully tapped into. Jena Potter : Yeah, her name's Jessie Tigges.

It's J E S S I E and then T I G G E S. And you know, something else that we've done is we've invited her into our leadership program. We have a leadership program of 20 people every year. And, you know, it's usually executives, elected officials, government employees.

We have a content creator in this class and having her take her experience and put it out into that. Not only is it, she's telling her story and her, you know, how this program is affecting her, but as a Chamber with a limited budget, her going and videoing all these things and putting it out there, I mean… phew. Amanda Ellis : That's awesome. Any other results you'd like to share from the day of, like, were the vendors successfully able to kind of offload some of that inventory and.

Yeah, make up a little bit of what they'd lost? Jena Potter : As I told you, we did an exit survey, and we are ecstatic to say in that exit survey, the projection is that they made somewhere between 150 to 175 thousand. So in two days, and to let you know, they were paying rent at I think about 120,000. So they made more than their monthly rent with just 67 of them, not the full three.

Right. In two days. And you know, some of that is the spotlight of crisis. Right.

But we have a community here that really wanted to come around these people, support them and man, it was a good feeling. Amanda Ellis : Right? It really is. And I would imagine that their products are at a range of price points too.

So that even plays, I don't know, makes that amount even more impactful when you think about like, you know, maybe there are some higher ticket type items, but I'm sure not all of it is. Some of it's probably food products and all kinds of stuff. Jena Potter : There was so much, I mean homemade sauces and pepper jellies to refurbished furniture, to secondhand books, to Squishies. There were dog things, a whole dog boutique there.

My, my dog had duck feet for like two weeks. Amanda Ellis : Right. Jena Potter : But yeah, there was quite the range of product. Amanda Ellis : Right.

Any specific vendors you'd like to shout out or if listeners are like, I would love to support some of these vendors, whether it's these or ones closer into their community. Is there any like resource you'd recommend or any you'd just like to mention? Jena Potter : Well, I would have to tell you, Ciao Bella, which Donna, and I talked about her a little bit briefly, but she was amazing. And really all of the vendors or businesses and we found out quickly and I hate that I've called them vendors probably a couple times on this call.

We found that the community was discounting them by saying vendors. These are small businesses and in talking to people, they were employing people to stock their shelves when they weren't there. So it had a ripple effect. And a lot of it was husband and wife duos.

So it's something that we've just tried to be mindful of and talking about them. But Donna went on the news with me multiple times. I brought her… Something that we do is we had a Women in Business luncheon probably a week into promoting this, a week out from having it. And I had Donna come and do a fireside chat with me on stage in front of 150 women about the impact of this and how they could come support in a week at the marketplace.

And so having that one small business spokesperson to talk about the impact and really tell the story was I think really pivotal for us to help the community understand the magnitude of this. Amanda Ellis : Yeah. And again, very mutually beneficial for both, both parties for obvious reasons. Any other, you know, updates on for these businesses?

Like, is anything else happening, you know, to help make them whole, maybe even outside of the, of the Chamber? And what's that looking like? Jena Potter : Yeah. So someone has come in and opened a new business called the Collective Boutiques, and they're opening them back up one by one.

Amanda Ellis : Oh, interesting. So same space and everything? Jena Potter : They're trying their best to get the same space everywhere. But the one in Franklin is already, the lease is active.

She, the CEO of this company is Melanie. I cannot remember her last name, but we're supposed to actually have a call this afternoon. Amanda Ellis : Right. Jena Potter : To talk about, you know, grand openings and things like that, but she's offered the booths back to the business owners.

A lot of them are under lease with her. She's meeting with them one on one because obviously there's a huge trust issue here with how everything went down. My understanding is she was in several, if not all, 61 locations. But on the website, it will show you who she's active with and then who she's pending with in different cities.

Amanda Ellis : Well, that's sort of a happy-ish ending. Jena Potter : Well for us, it's extremely happy because we've had several people email us and say, “because you guys had this, it gave me enough money to float by for them to reopen.” Right. And we didn't know they could reopen, you know, and so by doing this, we actually saved several small businesses from just liquidating and going on.

Yeah. And. And something else I would say, too, if you're a Chamber that didn't get to step in and do something that moment, it's not too late. In our exit survey, every single one of them said, we asked what would be beneficial and we gave a list of things.

100% came back and said, more marketplace opportunities and E-commerce training. I think E-commerce training was probably around 80%, I think. But if you can reach out to these businesses. And here's the thing, we didn't have the email list.

We relied on the media and Facebook groups and word of mouth to reach each business owner and tag them. So you can really do a grassroots effort to get a hold of these people and give them some offerings later on. If you're a Chamber that needs time to plan for that kind of thing. Amanda Ellis : Right, right.

Well, for listeners, if you're in a community that was impacted by this, now you have somebody who I bet would be willing to talk to you and walk you through supporting them. I think it's awesome. I think it's definitely award worthy. I know you mentioned that you'd entered this for a couple awards processes and I think you will definitely get some well deserved recognition from that.

But thank you so much for coming on and sharing this story. Again, we've got listeners all over. So Franklin, of course, is a very lovely place just south of Nashville, has been featured many times on Livability's you know, best places to live list and all of that good stuff. But our fun closer question, Jena, is something we ask every guest about their community, which is if someone were visiting or spending time there for the first time, what would be like a single bucket list item?

You would tell them they had to do, like something to eat or do or get outside and do. What would you suggest? Jena Potter : Okay, in the theme of this podcast, I have to say one, you need to go by Collective Boutiques. Formerly Painted Tree.

But also our historic downtown area. It's what we're known for. We're… our number one tourism driver is our Civil War sites. But I, I think we're very unique in our storytelling of that.

And so going and visiting those places you get a very inclusive history of how everything went. Amanda Ellis : Very cool. And you said they're going to be doing this in multiple markets. Did you say that?

Jena Potter : The Collective Boutiques? Yes. Amanda Ellis : Yeah. Okay.

Jena Potter : I think there's two or three confirmed under lease and then there's multiple that are pending. Amanda Ellis : Cool. All right, we'll try to find some good links for the show notes on that. Thank you so much, Jena for sharing and coming on today.

Jena Potter : Thanks Amanda. Amanda Ellis : Thanks for listening to the Livability podcast, where we take you Inside America's Best Cities. At Livability, we highlight the unsung awesomeness of small and mid-sized cities across the country. We also partner with communities to reach their target companies and potential residents through digital content and print magazine programs.

If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, rate, and review this show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also learn more about us at livabilitymedia.com. Have an idea for an upcoming episode?

Email me at aellis@livability.com. Until next time, from Livability, I'm Amanda Ellis, sharing the stories of America's most promising places.