Gabby Goodwin on COVID-19

Hi, I'm Gabby Goodwin. I am 14 years old, and I'm from Columbia, South Carolina. I am the CEO of Confidence and the inventor of GaBBY Bows. Before the pandemic, a large percent of our revenue came from keynote speeches and traveling and going to shows and things like that. so when the pandemic hit in the US, everything was canceled, everything was postponed and there were no vendor shows or speaking engagements to do. So we lost a big part of our revenue, not just in my business, but also in our family, as well as my dad's a comedian. So he also had many different shows canceled, uh, because of the pandemic. And that was really hard for us because we're like, where are we going to, you know, get this additional revenue. But as salons started to close and as more people were doing hair at home, we were able to introduce our hair products, to many different people through a bundle that we coined as the home haircare bundle. And that really took off. So we were able to have some of the strongest, months we've ever had in seven years, in a pandemic because we were able to take a small pivot. We didn't have to create another product. We just had to use our products that we already had and create a bundle to make sure that people had their needs. Uh, they, they had their, uh, wants you know, what they needed to do hair at home. And we were able to also, you know, market different challenges, uh, confidence in my hair challenge, which we started in the summer of 2020 in the pandemic, we were able to teach, you know, virtually moms, dads, grandmas, everybody who does hair at home to learn more about their daughter's hair or their son's hair. And being able to learn about not only having confidence or their child having confidence in their hair, but also being able to have confidence in maintaining it and styling it if there are no salons open right now. So that is something that we really are proud of. I, especially since there's been so many businesses that have been impacted by the pandemic, you know, brick and mortar or even online. So we're super grateful to have the opportunity that we did have, but that's kind of the way that we've been able to navigate in the pandemic and also doing virtual interviews and speeches as well to, you know, make up for that, not traveling and speaking, but, you know, staying at home and speaking through a computer. 

I'm in eighth grade, so, you know, this is my last year in middle school. Um, but since the pandemic hit, I've had to do it more online or had to stay safe, tried to stay safe. So we are online and remote. It definitely has its pros and cons, um, but you know, being able to stay at home and also as an entrepreneur and as a person who does a lot of interviews, I'm able to stay at home rather than, you know, take a day off of school and go travel, and that's really a pro is you can do it anywhere. So being able to, you know, be on vacation and do it, or, uh, have an interview in between classes and being able to go back and not having to travel, you know, back to school. So that is something that has been different for I know not just me but many different students across the world, but we definitely have to adjust to it to make sure that we maintain the spread of COVID-19.