“This will be our biggest year yet,” says Estelle Doiron, founder and CEO of Koffee Beauty in Moncton.

It’s not a phrase that many independent businesses will utter in 2020. But for Doiron, she saw her store’s online sales go up by 11,000 per cent and she said the company is now shipping about 200 orders a day. Overall sales have doubled, she said.

Online, 79 per cent of customers are now repeat customers, she said, some a result of a promotion earlier in the pandemic where many received gifts from friends and are now buying products for themselves.

It isn’t the kind of year Doiron planned for – she had planned to attend five trade shows, which were all cancelled – but she moved to bring more of her business online, hoping to move stock.

So in a year nobody planned for, the outcome has curiously been it’s easier to plan.

“With trade shows you never know," she said. "Now we can say I want to hit this target."

For her, it’s working.

"A lot of people say to me, how do you have it so together?” But really, she said, it’s that she had no choice but to figure it out.

"In 2020 we started shipping pallets of product, which is new to us," she said. "The whole logistics side and manufacturing quantities had to go up. We needed to learn how to get the best shipping rates and fulfil large orders."

Koffee Beauty also engaged a broker this year.

“That got us into a lot of distributors that distribute across the country and into the States,” she said. The company had considered this before, but 2020 pushed the company to be clear and strategic.

“When we really decided where we wanted to go and focused on that, that's when the success came with it,” she said.

“We’ve surpassed all projected forecasts,” she said.

The company is busy fulfilling Black Friday orders, which the company planned for all year, but Doiron told the Times & Transcript she has goals for 2021 in mind. She wants to add two more staff members to the team, to help with shipping and packages.

She also wants to expand further into the United States.

Despite big dreams, it’s still a local New Brunswick company, she said. Her staff are mostly in Moncton, but also Fredericton.

She is heartened to see the value many place on supporting local businesses during the pandemic.

It is only year four for Koffee Beauty.

“It’s scary. It’s fun. It’s exciting,” she said.