The Upside of Downtime

The old adage that “every cloud has a silver lining” is proving true for us during this unusual year. 

This global pandemic means that many of our shows, including our 10 days in front of the Depot in Cheyenne, Wyoming, during Frontier Days and our 12 days at the Minnesota State Fair, have been canceled.

We miss seeing our customers and our show family, folks we’ve known for years.

This forced downtime has been a hard hit to our business income, but it has opened an opportunity. The upside of downtime for us is time to revamp our online footprint – updating our website, adding social media channels and building a virtual audience.

Even though we’ve had our website since the internet dark ages of 1995, for the past several years, we (mostly I) have neglected our website while we concentrated primarily on our shows. 

In 2020, our focus has changed. Since mid-July we have been working constantly to revamp our website. We’ve added nearly 650 items and will add more each week as new items arrive.

In more “normal” times we only put western and farm-themed items on our website, those that we have enough to dedicate some stock as web-only. This year we have expanded our online offerings to include much more. 

We’ve added more personalized ornaments, including those that don’t fall into the western or farm categories; apparel; ribbon and other tree trimmers; decorative flags and even fall holiday items celebrating the Day of the Dead, Halloween, harvest and Thanksgiving.