Most of our spotlights feature a maker or a buyer, but this one is about a member whose whole job used to be conversation. She runs a small cheese counter in a college town, the kind of shop where a Tuesday visit for a wedge of cheddar could turn into twenty minutes of tasting samples and comparing notes on a producer's new batch. That shop has been closed to browsing since late March, and by early April she'd rebuilt the entire business around a folding table set up six feet from her own front door.
"The counter was never really about the cheese," she told us. "It was about someone standing there who knew fifty things about the wheel in front of you and wanted to tell you all fifty. You can't do that through a car window in ninety seconds, so I had to figure out what actually carries."
What carried and what didn't
What carried, in her telling, was specificity: instead of a general newsletter, she started sending a short weekly note naming exactly what had come in, who made it, and one thing worth trying with it — a pairing, a melt, a use for the rind. Online orders for curbside pickup jumped from a handful a week to most of her volume within about a month, which tracks with what we're seeing more broadly this spring — several reports peg the increase in online local-food ordering during April and May in the hundreds of percent, off what was admittedly a very small base for most small retailers.
What didn't carry as cleanly was discovery. Regulars who already knew what they liked adapted fastest; new customers, the ones who used to wander in off the sidewalk and ask what was good, mostly stopped happening. She's tried to replace that with short video clips of new arrivals, filmed on her phone at the counter she can no longer let anyone stand at. "It's not the same as a conversation," she said, "but it's better than nothing, and 'better than nothing' has been the whole spring."
The mechanics changed too, in ways that took longer to sort out than the customer-facing side. She'd never taken a phone order before this year, and building even a simple system for it — a shared list so she and her one part-time employee weren't double-selling the same wedge, a way to text someone when their order was ready without standing in the doorway to shout it — ate most of her first two weeks. "I spent more time in April thinking about logistics than I have in the previous five years combined," she said. "None of it is complicated. It's just new, and new takes time you don't have when you're also trying to keep the case full."
What she'd tell another member trying this
Her advice for members considering the same shift: don't try to replicate the full in-store experience online, because you'll spend all your time on production value and none on the thing that actually sells cheese, which is telling people specifically why this wheel is worth their money this week. Keep the list short. Keep it honest about what's actually good right now, not everything in the case.
She also pushed back gently on the idea that this pivot is temporary scaffolding to tear down once browsing comes back. Even after her doors reopen to walk-in customers, she plans to keep the weekly note and the phone-order option running alongside it, because a chunk of her customers — parents without childcare, people who'd rather not linger in a small shop even once it's allowed — have told her plainly they'll keep ordering that way regardless. "I built this because I had to," she said. "I'm going to keep some of it because it turned out to be better for a few people than what I had before."
If your own shop is working through a similar pivot, the Membership & Outreach Committee has started compiling notes like these from members who've been at it a few weeks longer than most — worth a call before you build your own version from scratch.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.