Business View Magazine | Volume 9, Issue 2

101 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 2 THE rta STORE ‘Making the difficult, easy’ F or The RTA Store, the COVID-19 pandemic was a whirlwind that started out with a lot of uncertainty and transformed into the ability to employ more individuals and service a whole new group of online consumers. While the online cabinetry retailer had to shut down operations at the start of the pandemic in March of 2020, they were able to resume within a few weeks and with that came a large influx in customers. “Not a day goes by that we don’t understand the real impact that COVID-19 had and still has on real people and real businesses around the world. We were one of the fortunate ones to come out unscathed,” says The RTA Store Co-CEO Tyler Ackerman. When the pandemic hit, the Hopewell Junction, New York company quickly moved its staff remote, while Ackerman and Co-CEO/co- founder Samantha Rougeux (also siblings) kept in contact through virtual meetings to create contingency plans for every possible scenario. “In those first few weeks of lockdown, everything just kind of froze – sales included – and traffic on the site dropped significantly,” says Ackerman.