- I'm normally a workaholic.

I'm used to working 10, 12-hour days if not longer, six, seven days a week.

When everything kinda got shut down, personally, it made me definitely slow up, kinda rethink how we were doing things.

(upbeat music) My name's David Gin.

I'm from Cleveland Candle Company and I'm one of the co-owners.

We make all the candles at our stores.

We also are a place where people can come make their own candles.

We were actually building out a party center in our Ohio City location.

It was supposed to be open by April 1st.

All the parties we had booked between April and even through today, most of them canceled or trying to rebook for the fall.

When the crisis first hit, obviously, we closed down the stores when the state shut down.

We then strictly went to online only.

We had done online before but doing the amount of volume that we started picking up doing was definitely different for us.

So that was good in the fact that we had some volume there, but it still probably was only about a tenth of the normal business that we did at the stores.

So right now, all three stores are open.

The biggest change, though, is in order to make candles in our shops, we have to have an appointment now.

We have designated areas that we set up in our stores where they can host groups of people away from other parties and stuff like that.

So right now you can only bring up to four people.

But the biggest part of our business that's hurting is the parties that we used to run.

I mean, we used to run so many parties on the weekends, and so all of that is just gone for right now.

Our first thing was to make our team members feel that they were safe working here, so if they didn't wanna come back, we didn't force anybody to come back.

So everybody that's here wants to be here working.

I think small business is very important.

We wanted to be there as soon as we could to kinda start the reopening process.

We wanted to be a part of that kinda rebuilding or that kinda like getting back out there.

I think a lotta people want to come back out and then when they find out that we are doing limited reservations or appointments online that they're happy about that because it gives them maybe something to do other than just staying at the house so that they can come into kinda more of a safe, confined environment.

And then when they see the spaces, they're way more comfortable.

The reason why we wanted to open so early is so that we can keep employing people.

I think, as a business owner, it's something that I take pride in is creating jobs for the communities that we're a part of.

It was hard for other people, so the sooner that we could be a part of that effort to get the jobs back, we definitely wanted to be a part of that.

That's kinda why I got into business in the first place is to create jobs in communities and stuff like that.

So if you're a customer and you go somewhere, even if you just send a quick email to them, you don't have to buy anything.

Just touch base even with them just saying, "Hey, glad you guys are open," or something like that, I think it goes a long way to help those owners that are trying to keep people employed and just trying to help their communities where they're at.