For more than four years, I’ve profiled several south suburban small-business owners in this column. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, here is a look at how one of those businesses has been affected in the seventh of an intermittent column series.
Sheila Humphrey was excited, positive and a bit nervous. She’d ventured into new territory. After working more than three decades for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and running a bridal consultant side business for several years, she opened a bridal boutique, DeLorne Bridal, in Matteson.
Less than a month later, she was forced to shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic and remained closed through much of July 2020.
Humphrey, who financed the business with her retirement savings, worried about how she was going to meet expenses. As a brand spanking new business, she said she didn’t qualify for government COVID-19 relief assistance.
“My biggest bill was rent,” she said. “I didn’t want to lose my space. Thankfully, I was still working at the VA, so I had income and I was able to continue to pay rent even though my doors were closed for several months.
“I just continued to pray. I knew the Lord didn’t lead me into doing this only for me to lose everything three weeks later. I said no, that couldn’t be. I had to remain faithful.”
Besides remaining faithful, over the past year she took action. She focused on conducting more research on the industry, perfecting her business plan, building her vendor base and expanding her product line from wedding, prom and evening dresses and accessories to include tuxedos and men’s suits to allow bridal parties to do one-stop shopping. She also moved in January to larger quarters that provide more than triple the space of her initial location, giving her more room for inventory and customers, who she sees by appointment.
“I knew eventually the doors would reopen,” Humphrey reflected. “I would have to be ready when they did.”
It was a rough first year for the business.
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“I did one wedding, and there were no proms,” Humphrey said, as the pandemic, economic shutdown and social distancing requirements caused potential customers to put the brakes on weddings, parties and other special events.
But this year, business picked up with the wedding season and everything has reopened, she said.
“People are back to trying to live their lives as normal as possible,” she said. “Prom season happened. A lot of the high schools still wanted to celebrate their students and have proms.”
So far this year, she has supplied dresses for about 20 weddings, she said.
Brides have made adjustments.
“When we reopened, things were pretty slow then because brides were uneasy as to whether they were going to be able to host their weddings,” she said. “But as time went on, they started figuring out different ways to have their weddings.”
Rather than the big elaborate weddings, they’re doing smaller, more intimate weddings, including backyard and in-home weddings, she said. Because of the shift to smaller weddings, brides also have also opted for a different type of dress. They don’t want big ball gowns; they are doing less extravagant gowns, more conservative gowns, she said.
They’ve also opted for smaller wedding parties. She said roughly 70% of her bridal customers have gone the smaller wedding route. But looking ahead to 2022 and 2023, she’s seeing an increase in plans for larger wedding parties.
Humphrey said she has been able to access vendors she likely otherwise wouldn’t have been able to in normal times.
“Initially a new business trying to connect with vendors and open accounts to get inventory is pretty difficult,” she said. “A lot of main vendors especially in bridal do not want to work with new businesses because you don’t have that history. You don’t have a lot of invoices where they can see your track record.”
But during the pandemic, vendors weren’t making the kind of money they were used to making, “so they relaxed a lot of their terms to accommodate new businesses like mine and I was able to get new inventory that I ordinarily wouldn’t have been able to get,” Humphrey said.
She also was able to lock in cheap airfares last year that have enabled her to economically travel to meet vendors in person to build vendor relationships, she said.
Humphrey initially became involved in the wedding business by volunteering as a wedding consultant at her church. That evolved into her running a wedding consulting business, said Humphrey, who is a certified wedding planner and member of the Association of Bridal Consultants. When she started exploring opening her own site, she decided on a bridal boutique in part because she loves fashion.
“Once I began doing my research and looking at the bridal industry in Illinois and how many stores there are, there are very, very few that are Black owned,” she said. “I said this is where I need to be.”
She wanted to bring her knowledge of the wedding industry to her community, said Humphrey, who retired from her job as a health care administrator at the VA in December to fully focus on the boutique.
DeLorne Bridal has benefited from technical assistance Humphrey received from the Illinois Small Business Development Center at the Women’s Business Development Center South Suburbs office in Richton Park. The center assists startup, expanding and mature businesses and helped her with her business plan and to think through the various aspects involved in opening and successfully running a business, she said.
Humphrey has taken appropriate steps to position her business for success, said Tasha Brown, the development center’s director of ScaleUp.
“She has done a great job with envisioning what she wants her business to be, looking at her product line and identifying her target market,” Brown said. “She’s constantly adjusting and adapting to a changing environment for her business.”
The takeaway for other entrepreneurs is:
“There are some business owners that will execute without a plan,” Brown said. “Some will plan and not execute. Make sure you plan, then execute but also make sure you look for opportunities.”
Humphrey noted among new business she is seeing is young adult customers shopping for formal attire for so-called sneaker balls, where attendees dress in formal gowns and tuxedos and gym shoes.
She sees continuing brighter days ahead for DeLorne Bridal.
“I expect to double or triple what I’m doing now” in sales next year, she said.
Among the biggest lessons she has learned from her pandemic experience is:
“Remain steadfast,” she said. “Don’t give up, and know your business. Cover all your bases because you never know what can happen. You have to be prepared for any and every situation.”
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Francine Knowles is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown.