Economy Candy: Three generations of sweets and success

We recently got to visit Mitchell and Skye Cohen at Economy Candy to learn about the history of their business and how they use WooCommerce. While our team was in New York, we also filmed a short interview, which you can check out below or on our YouTube channel. Want the full story? Keep on reading for all of the sweet, sweet details of their success. 🍬🍭

Please note that some quotes have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Economy Candy began in the 1930s as a penny sweets cart outside a shoe and hat repair shop in New York City. 

Since then, three generations of the Cohen family have turned the business into a Lower East Side mainstay — with the corner of Rivington and Essex named after Mitchell’s grandfather — and national distributor of goodies from around the world. Now, Mitchell Cohen and his wife, Skye Greenfield Cohen, continue that legacy.

“Starting before he could even see over the counter, Mitchell would work with his dad behind the register standing on a milk crate, tallying bills and calculating the change in his head,” Skye shared. 

Skye has also continued an important tradition: ensuring that her husband continued the family business, just as Mitchell’s mother and grandmother had done for their husbands.

Their most recent evolution included an upgraded ecommerce strategy in March of 2020. When they overhauled their website, which luckily happened just in time for Covid-19 closures, they also updated their store operations. 

Economy Candy brought nearly 2,500 SKUs into their online store, live syncing their inventory management, and began using a combination of shipping and local pickup options to keep their business going (and their customers happy) through the pandemic and beyond.

• Family-run business since 1937.
• From push cart to nationwide shipping.
• Reached almost 10,000 online transactions in 2023.
• Their website accounts for 20 to 25% of annual sales each year.
• Live syncing of inventory of nearly 2,500 SKUs.

Economy Candy has weathered significant worldwide and local catastrophes in its 88-year history, and yet, they’re still going strong. Their enduring presence is due in large part to their commitment to their customers, maintaining the accessibility of their products through all of the challenging times. 

Over the past five years, they’ve added nearly 500 new products to their inventory — which now boasts an astounding 2,500 different sweets and goodies.

Getting to 2,500 SKUs, however, required an operational pivot: all of their inventory operations used to reside exclusively in Mitchell’s brain.

“Up until the pandemic, all of Economy Candy’s inventory was stored in Mitchell’s head,” Skye shared. “Our staff had to memorize the prices of all 2,000+ items we carried because we were still using dumb cash registers where the price of each item had to be manually entered. In 2021 we took a leap into the 21st century and upgraded to Square digital registers.”

Their modernization coincided with the pandemic, which exasperated the need for efficient (and online-friendly) inventory management. Not allowed to bring staff in-store, Mitchell and Skye moved all sales online, managing fulfillment themselves.

In 2021, they added Square digital registers and implemented barcode scanning, using Thrive to sync in-store sales with their ecommerce business.

Economy Candy has been online since the dawn of the millennium. In their hunt for a solution that didn’t feel restricted in functionality or growth, they switched platforms several times until 2015 — when they found WooCommerce.

“When WooCommerce was presented to us, it was clear that limitations would no longer be an issue. Because WooCommerce is open source, there is no ceiling. There’s no limit to what you can do, what you can customize, what you can create. And it’s been great ever since.”
— Skye Greenfield Cohen, Co-owner, Economy Candy

Their WooCommerce store is responsible for 20 to 25% of their total sales each year, with seasonal spikes in traffic around the holidays.

Managing complexity with ease

Thrive sits between WooCommerce and Economy Candy’s other third-party tools, and syncs sales data for in-store purchases, online transactions, and ShipStation. They’ve also integrated the site with UPS, FedEx, Route, Mailchimp, Google, and Meta. With a total of 57 active plugins and custom code, Economy Candy manages a complex network of tools and services.

“It’s incredible the way that WooCommerce is able to talk to all these different programs.”
— Skye Greenfield Cohen, Co-owner, Economy Candy

Customization and candy go hand-in-hand

One aspect that Mitchell and Skye love about WooCommerce is the breadth of options for customization — something that comes in handy when your products might melt during warmer seasons: “Shipping chocolate in the summer is tough. It is a challenge, but one thing that Woo has been great [for], there’s a myriad of popups and messages that you can easily set up.” 

“[For example,] I can set a warning,” noted Skye, “for anything that’s chocolate, put this text on that page so that the person ordering it knows that this is chocolate, there is a risk of melting. Do they want to add ice? Do they want to add cold packaging? So all those plugins [allow us to] set it and forget it… And it has really made shipping chocolate much less of a heartbreak.”

Their focus on customer satisfaction has been the key to their success: “Economy Candy has survived for nearly 90 years on word of mouth,” Skye shared. “Of course, what ‘word of mouth’ means has changed a bit in the last century, from literal word of mouth to now including having our customers post about us on TikTok and Instagram and having a social media presence ourselves.”

To inspire that organic promotion, they follow the rule of threes: If three people give the same feedback or request, they do their best to accommodate it. This often impacts their product and inventory decisions, from importing international sweets to making sure they stock candy from their oldest customers’ youth. 

They take a similar approach to new product decisions, considering the selection from the customer’s point of view: Would the customer be excited to see it in store, or has someone requested something similar? Is it a unique product that they haven’t seen before?

Mitchell and Skye are also mindful of future generations of their audience. Their Gen Z staff members help them stay up to date on TikTok trends and viral sweets, such as Swedish candy, freeze-dried candy, and slime lickers.

As the business grows, Economy Candy continues to play to WooCommerce’s strengths. Taking advantage of all of the customization options, Mitchell and Skye know that they can change direction whenever the need arises. 

“Being able to pivot without recreating your website from scratch every few years, which we used to do — now we’re making tweaks on an existing platform instead of starting from scratch, and that saves a lot of money, a lot of time.”
— Mitchell Cohen, Co-owner, Economy Candy

“With WooCommerce as the central foothold of our platform and adding pieces around that, … EconomyCandy.com is customized to what EconomyCandy.com needs to be for Economy Candy customers and for Economy Candy staff to be able to operate on the backend. We are able to put in all those custom functionalities that work for our specific business.”