Page 7 - BusinessWest July 6, 2020

Puffer’s Salon & Day Spa
Responding to COVID-19 Has Been Hair-raising to Say the Least
Judy Puffer knows she’s ready for a vacation. What she doesn’t know is whether she’s going to get one any time soon.
With that, she speaks for the vast majority of business own-
ers and managers coping with everything the COVID-19 pandemic is throwing at them. In short, shutting down the economy was anything but a break for most people in business, reopening was exhausting on many levels, and doing business now is ... well, anything but business as usual or what life was like before any of us heard of that now infa- mous name followed by a number.
“I was working hard behind the scenes — probably harder than when we were open,” said Puffer, founder and owner of Puffer’s Salon & Day Spa in Westfield, who told BusinessWest that the past three and a half months have easily been her most trying in business. And while most all aspects of that business are now open again, getting here
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JUDY PUFFER
wasn’t easy, and challenges remain.
“It was obstacle after obstacle after obstacle just trying to get set up to open. Governor Baker did a great job with all this, but he gave us very little notice; he said, ‘OK, you can open,
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but you have to have these protocols
in place.’ It was like setting up a whole new way to do
Printing ” business, and we weren’t given much time to do it.
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Replaying the tape from the past 100 days or so, she recounted
Printing
challenges ranging from shortages of needed supplies and encounters
with price gouging to lack of guidance from the state and federal gov- ernments regarding how and when reopening would occur, to clogged phone lines once the ‘open’ sign was back on the door.
Some of this she could see coming, like those busy phone lines, but
most of it she couldn’t, and as she retells her story, one can sense the exhaustion, exasperation, and, yes, relief in her voice now that most of the really hard stuff is in the past tense. Or so she hopes.
Turning the clock back to March 23, Puffer said from the day the shutdown order was given, the focus turned to reopening. And there were challenges everywhere, including this state’s slow, cautious approach — which actually turned out to be a kind of blessing in dis- guise, although she didn’t use those exact words.
“One of the things that really helped me was being part of the Aveda Corporation,” she said, referring to the Minneapolis-based sup- plier of high-end health and beauty products that has affiliated with salons across the country. “The company immediately started owner calls, two a week that ran for an hour to an hour and a half; what they would do is get people from a variety of states on these webinars. That was huge because we were getting feedback from people who were opening in Georgia about the challenges they were facing; we were getting people from California who were still closed, talking about what they were doing to get open; we heard from people in Florida, Colorado, Minnesota, New York.
Thank you
“All this really helped me,” she went on, “because there wasn’t really any guidance from this state from anyone. Getting that help from Aveda was huge because
I could then take what these
states were doing and put Continued on page 40
Puffer’s
BusinessWest COVID-19 JULY 6, 2020 7
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