Wells Fargo Works Customer Story
Mediterránia Marc Galante
Duration: 3:37

I’m Marc Galante from Mediterránia in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And essentially we are a high-end home furnishing store with a heavy emphasis on European antiques, architectural elements, accessories, and textiles.

2019 was a phenomenal year for us in so far as our high season here and sales I fully expected 2020 to be the same. So, between mid-February and the end of the first week in March, I was back home in Southern Europe buying like a fool and I bought our largest shipment ever. And then when I got home, the world had shifted on its axis and everything was different.

We had to think of ways to very quickly pivot, get people’s attention and continue maintaining and growing our business.

I had been thinking about it for quite some time because of the way that we’re structured in our pricing. So, I said, let’s do 50 off. That will get people’s attention.

The results of our promotion have been significant, despite having been shut down for seven weeks with our doors closed, despite discounting 50 percent, despite being in the middle of a pandemic, and despite Santa Fe seeing a drop in tourism, we are almost 30% up over 2019.

I think one of the reasons why this has been so successful is because people know that we don’t constantly run sales, and this is something very unusual. We’ve never done it before in our history.

And people say, Well, wow, 50% off, you guys have always had great merchandise, you have excellent quality. And even when we were at full-blown retail, people knew that they were getting a great product at a fair price. So, I think those are the contributing factors as to the success of this restructure in pricing.

Some people want to know how we could possibly afford to do this, and because of the way that we’re structured in Europe, we’re buying at least 40 percent better than our competitors, and that allows us to do wholesale pricing and discounting.
As a result of our new pricing structure and the significant increase in our sales volume, I think that as a business owner and as a company, we would be foolish to go back to straight retail.
Santa Fe is a town that depends entirely on tourism. When people aren’t coming local businesses are suffering.

COVID forced us to take a very hard look at our business as to what needed to be done to, you know, weather the storm.

Our digital team convinced us that we needed to have a greater outreach and the most efficient way to do that was through digital marketing and social media outreach. And we’ve been able to create quite a bit of excitement through the Instagram posts and on Facebook, and we want to continue to do that.

We were fortunate. We pivoted very quickly, and we made those changes happen in short order. I would encourage other business owners working in a new environment to concentrate on their strengths, work on correcting the deficiencies or weaknesses in their business and, certainly, it’s not too late to affect positive changes in their business.

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