How have our beloved small businesses adapted to life in lockdown? Clare-Louise Shaw, Founder of Mini Mozart tells us how her baby and toddler music class business has changed course to manage the Covid-19 storm.
“We at Mini Mozart have pivoted so fast in response to lockdown that our ears are still ringing! On the Wednesday before lockdown, we gathered an ensemble together to film all our favourite nursery rhymes and classical music so that we would have some excellent quality music to drop into the online classes that were already percolating away in our imaginations.
In a single socially distanced day, we managed to record 41 tracks! Trust me, when I worked at BBC Classical Music TV, we never got anywhere near that! Exhausted, we all slept well that night and didn’t pay too much attention to the fact that it was likely to be the last time we would be in the same room with our beloved musician colleagues for quite some time.
The next couple of weeks were a maelstrom of activity. It’s taken us nearly 15 years to build the scale and reputation that Mini Mozart enjoyed before lockdown, but only one tiny virus to wipe us out in one fell swoop, and frankly, that simply was not acceptable to us. We worked 18 hour days editing the videos, coming up with a new format that would work online, testing, testing and testing again the different settings on Zoom, marketing our new offering and training our musicians on how to communicate best online.
A few weeks ago we were incredulous at people’s tales of tupperware organisation and crafting sessions with their kids. Who had the time!? It took us a few weeks to get used to ‘the new normal’, but now the Mini Mozart Lockdown Live Lounge is now broadcasting 17 live classes per week and has a dedicated following so we’re doing what everyone else is doing; making the best of these strange times, enjoying spending less fraught time with our families, and taking each day as it comes.
The best part of every day? Honestly, it’s seeing the children’s smiley faces beaming back at us on screen, waving at the colleagues we haven’t seen, and remembering what fun we had filming the music together in what seems like a lifetime ago.”
To book online classes with Mini Mozart CLICK HERE.
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