We sat down with third-generation husband-and-wife owners Mitchell Cohen and Skye Greenfield Cohen of Economy Candy in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in late 2024 to learn more about their history. We discussed the origins of Economy Candy’s enduring legacy, how they’ve been able to evolve over time, and how WooCommerce made this process so much easier. The following video is the result and below is the transcript of our conversation, which has been edited for length, clarity, and to fit the format.
Can you tell us the story of the history of the business?
↑ Back to topMitchell
Economy Candy has been around since 1937. We started as a shoe and hat repair shop that just had a push cart outside that sold candy. But during the depression, people weren’t getting things repaired. They didn’t have that kind of money, but penny here, penny there for some candy, it made you happy.
When my grandfather Moishe returned from World War II, he and his brother-in-law joined the business. Every single person in the family had a part-time or full-time job at Economy Candy. It got down to just my grandparents in the sixties and seventies, and in the early eighties, my parents, Jerry and Eileen, took over the business and ran it through the real change of the Lower East Side and the start of the internet.
We became a destination for tourists and the locals that had been customers with us since the thirties with their grandparents or parents. About ten years ago, I joined full-time after working on Wall Street, and then Skye joined soon after that. We’re on our third generation here and we just had the fourth generation about a year ago.
What is the secret that has allowed Economy Candy to stay in business for so long and weather so many challenging times?
↑ Back to topMitchell
What really sets us apart is that we are not just a family-owned business. We’re a family-owned and operated business. So a lot of times you go into these businesses that have been around for a very long time, but you don’t see anyone from the family. They’re not necessarily present.
When you walk in, you’re going to see Skye and me. You’re going to see our daughter with us behind the counter just holding on as we do the register. This is a real family business. My parents still come in when they’re in town. Customers love to see my parents and kibitz with them and share old stories.
People still come in and tell me stories about how they knew my grandparents. It just makes you feel good and that keeps them coming back. They know they’re supporting a family business and they know they’re going to be able to forget about everything that’s going on in the world, have some fun in the candy store, and talk about past memories.
Skye
In February of 2023, we opened our first ever second location in Chelsea Market. It’s much smaller than this, but —
Mitchell
We call it a Taste of Economy Candy.
Skye
It’s our satellite location. It shows that after 88 years, you can still keep things young and fresh.
When did you start using WooCommerce?
↑ Back to topSkye
We were on so many different platforms from when we first launched a website in 2000 through to 2015. With each platform that we were on, there were limitations that kept us from making our website what our customers were looking for and what our staff wanted to be able to provide.
And then in 2015, we discovered WooCommerce.
What’s amazing about WooCommerce is that since it’s open source, there’s 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.
We haven’t had any problems.
Mitchell
We have over 2,000 products and each product is unique. Sometimes there are different things you need to advertise about that product or adapt how it’s displayed and how it’s sold. To be able to make it so that a customer feels like they’re just in our store shopping and understanding what they’re getting with the variety has been really helpful.
Is it true that you at one point were memorizing all your stock in your head?
↑ Back to topMitchell
At Economy Candy, our inventory has been in the head of either my grandfather, my father, or myself. Like I said, we have over 2,000 varieties of candies and you have to know how much you have and when you need to order. We have this 1,000 square-foot store of retail space and below us is 1,000 square feet of storage. It really was just us walking around and knowing when to reorder as we placed orders daily from over a hundred different people, so it was very difficult.
Skye was always on top of the fact that we needed to streamline this. “We have WooCommerce; we can link it with Square and take this off your shoulders.” I was very hesitant about how we were going to do that and re-inventory.
With the pandemic, the inventory went down to almost nothing. We were then able to reorganize and re-inventory the store and finally make that change. It’s made everything much smoother coming out of the pandemic.
How large is your online business today?
↑ Back to topMitchell
We’ve been online since 2000, but it has always been a part of our business. It has really taken off as we’ve evolved the website.
With the pandemic, we were only online for almost two years. We were driving people to the website and website sales jumped. After the pandemic, people came back, but the online sales still grew because we were able to reach out to people all over the country — not just our local customers.
So the website is now up to about 20 to 25% of our business. Online alone, we did about 10,000 transactions during the pandemic and even last year, it really didn’t go down too much from there.
What’s the process like with online orders and shipping them out?
↑ Back to topSkye
Anyone can place an order from us at economycandy.com. We ship throughout the entire United States. We’re working on expanding that to Canada.
Woo has the capability for us to put in the logistics for shipping anywhere, which is making it easier for us to figure out — on our part — how international customers can place an order on economycandy.com.
The orders come through to our Woo dashboard and every morning, we get in and print them out.
They come out as invoices and our team comes down to the sales floor and fills the orders. It really is like a little personal shopper kind of experience. There’s no warehouse or anything; there’s no fulfillment center. Everything ships out of here. We fill up the basket with the order and it goes upstairs.
We pack and ship to anywhere in the country. We use ShipStation for shipping labels and that integrates with Woo amazingly. It pulls the order number. It pulls what the package should weigh. It pulls the shipping service. So everything is already preloaded when you go to print the label.
There’s very little that we have to do, which is incredible. It’s incredible the way that WooCommerce is able to talk to all these different programs. Mitchell mentioned Square before which Woo talks to for inventory. It’s really a huge burden off our shoulders to be able to just sync everything.
What complexities or challenges have you encountered in the fulfillment process?
↑ Back to topSkye
Shipping chocolate in the summer is tough. It’s a challenge, but one thing that Woo has been great for is that there’s a myriad of different little pop-ups and messages that you can easily set.
I can set one warning and say anything that’s chocolate, put this little text on that page so that the person ordering it knows there’s a risk at checkout. Do they want to add ice? Do they want to add cold packaging? All these plugins, you set it and forget it. You make the selections for which products qualify for these warnings, for these pop-ups. It has made shipping chocolate much less of a heartbreak.
Up until two years ago, the amount of emails we’d get — we’d spend an hour, two hours a day, responding to these emails and troubleshooting what we could do for customers and now, there’s a plugin for that.
As your business has grown, what adjustments have you made to your team, your processes, and your infrastructure?
↑ Back to topSkye
Up until the pandemic, things were largely done the same way — with dumb cash registers where you have to put the price in manually, not just Mitchell memorizing all the inventory. All of our staff had memorized all the prices because nothing was digital.
Everything was on our website on Woo, but it didn’t connect to our physical store at all. So all the employees had to memorize all the prices and if there was a price change, it would take weeks to actually catch up to charging that price because once it’s imprinted, it’s really hard to overwrite it in your brain.
Mitchell
So during the pandemic, we used that time to not only do a refresh to the interior retail store, but to also streamline our processes so that the retail store and online store were under the same roof and didn’t feel like separate entities.
Whereas before, we’d have all these online orders and by the time they get downstairs, it’d be like, oh, sorry, the last of it went out this weekend.
Now there are a lot of emails and behind-the-scenes updates that we’re getting in real time that help us keep the retail store and the online store synced.
How do you go about sourcing your products?
↑ Back to topMitchell
Economy Candy has had the same relationships since 1937. I’m buying from companies that my grandfather bought from, that my parents bought from.
That’s why we have a lot of products where people come in and say, “they don’t make this anymore!” It’s like, well they do, but they only really sell it in the Midwest, but we’ve been buying from them for 60 years, so they still send us a couple cases every month.
These are the relationships that my grandfather founded, that my father and mother founded, that really allow us to stay in business and get all these different items and then, things expand from there. We used to have a small imported area with a few Cadbury bars, things like that. Now almost half the store is imported products from around the world, from Japan, from Canada, from China, from India, I mean really everywhere.
We have all these unique products and that’s from establishing all these different relationships and growing them over the years. Going to the candy shows in Chicago and New York just to meet people and find one or two new products.
We see a thousand different things, but if we can bring one or two new products every couple months, it really makes us unique. Whenever people ask for stuff, if we don’t have it and if three people ask for it, I’m going to track it down. That’s our rule of three: always call it when three people ask for something or have a recommendation or suggestion. We want to make sure we have everything that everybody wants.
Can you tell us more about your relationship with the local community?
↑ Back to topMitchell
Being a Lower East Side staple since 1937, we employ local and we sell local.
Obviously we are all over the states with our website, but we really are a Lower East Side institution. People come down to us: they go to lunch at Katz’s and then they come to us for dessert. They’re making us their Saturday, their Sunday, and they’re coming with their kids because their parents brought them here.
We’ve been so far back, not a day goes by that someone doesn’t come in to tell us an anecdote, about my father, my mother, or my grandparents, and it makes me love coming in and hearing that and learning, sometimes, something that I didn’t even know.
They named the corner of Rivington and Essex after my grandfather, Morris ‘Moishe’ Cohen, because back when we were on that corner, we used to have to set up outside. Half the store was outside in barrels and tables and my grandfather would get in at six, seven in the morning, set all that up and stand outside.
Whether it was raining, it was zero degrees, a hundred degrees, he was outside selling from the corner. People would come by and he was known as the unofficial mayor of Rivington Street. They would come by to chat with him.
Skye
It was when we were petitioning for the city to name the corner after him that we heard that he was considered the mayor down here. We hadn’t heard that before.
There was someone who told us that they proposed to their wife on his advice and they’ve been married for 60 years or so.
Mitchell
A lot of stories came out of doing that work. It was many years of hard work by Skye, but it paid off in the end and it was a nice process along the way as well.
How do you find most of your customers and keep them coming back either to the store or online?
↑ Back to topSkye
Economy Candy’s always been word of mouth. We’re old school. I wouldn’t say that we’ve never paid for advertising, but it’s really —
Mitchell
It’s not a big part of our budget.
Skye
It’s not a part of our budget. In the thirties, the forties, the fifties, it was literal word of mouth. Now word of mouth is Instagram, TikTok, and a website so that people can find you. But I think it’s that we have such a unique variety of candy.
We have everything. We have your grandparents’ favorites, we have your favorites, we have your kids’ favorite thing that they just found on TikTok that they have to have right now. That keeps people shopping with us and finding us new.
Mitchell
There’s still tour groups that come in every day and people who have been coming in for three generations, but with social media, when someone posts something about our store and it goes viral, we wind up getting really busy for a few weeks. It’s great.
What’s the main thing about WooCommerce that has kept you on the platform and been crucial to your success?
↑ Back to topSkye
WooCommerce is open source. So anyone, anywhere can build a plugin that will enable your website to do whatever it is you need it to do. That kind of broad functionality has kept us with Woo and has kept us and our website successful.
Mitchell
Being able to pivot without recreating your website from scratch every few years, which we had to do before — recreate and restart from scratch every time. Now we’re making tweaks on an existing platform instead of starting from scratch and that just saves a lot of money, a lot of time. We’re evolving and learning, but with WooCommerce as the central foothold of our platform, we can just add pieces around that.
What are your personal favorites in the shop and what do you see as bestsellers?
↑ Back to topMitchell
What’s great about having over 2,000 items is that your personal favorite can change almost every day. I mean, my go-to is the Milk Chocolate Covered Butter Crunch, which is a square hard caramel, chocolate covered with crushed almonds. But when we get new things in, you’ve got to try it.
We’re getting all these unique KitKats from around the world and unique Snickers bars. There’s a Snickers pistachio with turmeric that wasn’t my favorite, but there’s something different to try every day and you have to be able to try it to recommend it, right? I mean it’s a rule of thumb.
Skye
That’s true. Even if you don’t like it, you can describe it to someone and then they can decide if it’s worth it for them. It’s research, it’s R&D.
Mitchell
What’s crazy is that bestsellers also change every day. We might get an online order for hundreds of pounds of just red candy for a corporate event. You might have someone that comes in and is buying their favorite chocolate bar that they can’t get elsewhere or their favorite imported item that they can’t find anywhere else but Economy Candy. So your number one bestseller really does change every day. Whether it’s online or in store, it’s also very unique.
What’s next for Economy Candy?
↑ Back to topSkye
What’s next for economycandy.com is shipping to Canada. The biggest hurdle for that is taxes, tariffs, and duties. WooCommerce has native functionality for all of this, which is great.
The biggest hurdle is figuring out what all those percentages are and if they’re variable, depending on where they ship to. But we don’t even need a plugin to ship to Canada with WooCommerce, which is great. Plugins are fantastic because you can do whatever you want to do with them. But if you can do it without a plugin, it’s even better.
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