(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
One year later: Resiliency defines Swannanoa Valley business community — The Valley Echo [1]
['Fred Mccormick']
Date: 2025-06
Transition was coming for Shirtmandude in the early months of 2020, as the online retailer looked for a new location to produce its “fun shirts for weird people.” By the time the calendar turned to March, owner Jay Longshore and his team of three were eyeing the former longtime home of a used bookstore on Cherry Street.
It was the first time in the 15 years since the former advertising writer founded the small t-shirt company in Los Angeles that Shirtmandude would display their merchandise in a brick and mortar retail establishment, but as the crew prepared to move equipment from Swannanoa to downtown Black Mountain, a trickle of news about the emerging threat of a new virus was gaining momentum, and the wheels of change were turning faster than anyone realized.
The impending COVID-19 pandemic would impact businesses worldwide in the months to come, and the Swannanoa Valley was no exception, but the emerging theme a year later is one of resiliency.
“We had to fight to get this building in the first place, and we were under contract when the pandemic really hit here,” said Longshore, who is one of several entrepreneurs to open local businesses in 2020. “We were in the due diligence phase, and we could still back out, but in a really frank conversation with my wife about all of our options she said, ‘the world isn’t going to stop with all of this, it will still go on.’”
In a leap of faith, a three-month renovation was underway on an open concept that allows amused customers to browse a selection of clever t-shirt designs while observing the production process behind the counter.
“We were here working for part of that time, and we had plastic hanging down and couldn’t really see outside,” Longshore said. “We’d peek out the door every now and then just to see if anyone was even out walking around.”
By the time they opened their doors to the public in mid-August, displaying a vast inventory containing everything from images of Bigfoot looking over his shoulder while carrying a six-pack to a vintage portrait of Johnny Paycheck drinking a Coors Light under the titular line of the 1977 hit song, “Take This Job and Shove It,” Shirtmandude was in a unique position.
“During the pandemic our online orders doubled,” Longshore said. “That allowed us to put a little more money into this space, and as soon as we opened the doors we were hitting well above the numbers I knew we had to hit to keep the doors open, during the pandemic. That was really encouraging.”
Nobody knew what to expect
As governments around the world began implementing unprecedented measures to slow the spread of COVID-19, small businesses in the Swannanoa Valley braced for an impact they couldn’t possibly estimate at the time.
“Nobody knew what to expect,” said Black Mountain Swannanoa Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Sharon Tabor. “We were walking into the unknown.”
The widespread closure of nonessential businesses forced local retailers to adapt quickly, according to Tabor, who guided the chamber through its own challenges.
“We were a nonessential business and, like our retail businesses and restaurants, the visitor center was closed for two months,” she said. “But, we volunteered our time to keep everything going. We filed for unemployment, but Glenda (Morrow) and I continued to do the work.”
The two employees of the chamber, which relies heavily on volunteers in its efforts to support the local economy through its partnerships with local businesses and tourism services, continued to fulfill vital obligations while Tabor was out of the office for two months and Morrow was out for nine.
“My focus at the time was getting information out to the community,” Tabor said. “We changed the format of our newsletter to provide updates on which local businesses were still operating, and we didn’t limit it to our chamber partners. We put every business in there that we knew of because we wanted to keep everyone to know what businesses were still operating what their hours were.”
The chamber employees-turned-volunteers directed local business owners to resources as they became available, guiding applicants to initiatives like the Paycheck Protection Program and One Buncombe Fund, which awarded grants to 26 Swannanoa Valley businesses in 2020, according to Tabor.
While the application period for the latest round of assistance from the One Buncombe Fund closed at the end of February, PPP loans are available through the U.S. Small Business Administration through the month of March, according to the chamber director.
“Many people have been reluctant to go back into this round of PPP funding, due to the complications they encountered during the first round,” she said. “But this round has been opened up to more types of businesses, and the application process is much more streamlined.”
Accessing available resources and adapting to a world in which face-to-face customer contact was prohibited became priorities for many local businesses. Restaurants began facilitating curbside pickup, retailers pivoted to online sales and the normally bustling downtown business district fell silent. The shutdown forced some small business owners to cut back on staffing, leading to a spike in Buncombe County unemployment rates that peaked at 17.7% in April of 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those numbers decreased dramatically to 5.9% by January, but remain more than twice what they were 13 months ago.
Fraught with uncertainty, small business owners navigated the rapidly evolving guidance from authorities to keep their doors open, but emerging trends indicated to Tabor that confidence remained.
“Restaurants maintained largely through outdoor seating, which became a trend here many years ago,” Tabor said. “And some of those who didn’t have outdoor seating had the property to create it.”
As business and travel regulations loosened, visitors sought refuge in lower-density places like the Swannanoa Valley, according to the chamber director, who added that traffic at the visitor center in September and October of 2020 was well above 2019 figures.
“A trend across the country is that more populated areas, like Asheville and the Piedmont, were hit pretty hard, business-wise, by the pandemic,” Tabor said. “At the same time, however, small towns are being rediscovered.”
New neighbors and new beginnings
When Longshore set up shop on Cherry Street and began meeting his new neighbors, he found Shirtmandude was one of many businesses that opened at some stage in the pandemic. Right next door, Element Tree Essentials began selling its handcrafted soy lotion candles in May of 2020. New businesses were also emerging along State Street where The Enchanted Oak settled into the space once occupied by the Black Mountain Yarn Shop, which expanded in a location down the road in 2019. Next door, in a space once home to Song of the Wood, a tapas bar is currently under construction.
The new downtown shops are representative of a flurry of growth and reinvention that has changed the landscape of the business community during the pandemic, according to Tabor.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.thevalleyecho.com/all-news/one-year-later-resiliency-defines-swannanoa-valley-business-community#:~:text=Businesses%20like%20the%20Native%20Kitchen,our%20lifeboats%20and%20kept%20rowing.%E2%80%9D
Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/
