Winning Brands: Progress in Adaptation

The impact of COVID-19 on the business landscape is profound. Nothing has been left untouched – but some companies are adjusting better than others. Winning Brands is trying to adjust.

There are severe choke points in supply lines for raw materials and packaging, there are store closures, there are changing attitudes amongst financial institutions, there is altered consumer behaviour – and so much more.

Dramatic declines of entire economic sectors are occurring, such as the hotel and restaurant categories, which Winning Brands was about to expand into, prior to COVID-19, with our Clean Spaces Progam. Most jurisdictions in North America have declared a State of Emergency, and reduced both personal movement and freedom of choice.

There is no single description of the current situation that accurately describes the whole picture. It is a mosaic with many different aspects that figure into a larger whole. The picture is made more complicated by the fact that the easing of restrictions on people and businesses to work, and to travel, are not uniform across jurisdictions. This creates a patch-work of conditions.

Winning Brands has been seeking ways to re-prioritize its originally planned joint ventures.

At the moment, the top Winning Brands priority is to remain a business that continues to operate, rather than becoming a spectator, or ceasing operations temporarily or permanently.

That means, in practical terms, getting “allocation access” to raw materials, securing packaging, coping with delayed and cancelled purchase orders, adjusting to changing patterns in product demand, and more.

Winning Brands has focused in the past 6 weeks in speeding up its efforts on the hand sanitizer front, as one example. We have performed a consultancy with one group wanting to get into the hand sanitizer business. Winning Brands has also created its own brand, SafetyClenz, as the basis of a joint venture with a promotional products organization in order to make our SafetyClenz brand of hand sanitizer available as a sponsored item across industry. That is a foot-in-the-door to be expanded to include other Winning Brands cleaning products for use as sponsored promotional items, such as the 125mL bottle of 1000+ Stain Remover (as an alternative to stain sticks, for example).

Below are photos recently taken of the new SafetyClenz product. www.SafetyClenz.com. A trial delivery has been made. We are awaiting consumer feedback.

My point in this update is not to claim that we are successful in the midst of this business crisis, but instead to state that we are adjusting ourselves so that we may see our way through it, if no forces undermine our progress, either amongst creditors or by further external events.

All I can promise is a real effort. I am glad to report that this adjusted emphasis has gone from being theory to practical action, albeit still on a small scale. This by itself is an important achievement.

With thanks,
Eric Lehner, CEO
Winning Brands