A year ago today, Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued the executive order that shuttered restaurants, movie theaters, performance venues, bars, fitness centers, and spas – and more. Here are four local businesses -- two that weathered their toughest year ever, and two that would love to repeat the past 365 days.

Worst Year Ever?
Sincerely, Ginger Event Design & Production helps out-of-town couples plot destination weddings in northern Michigan. According to owner and principal designer Rachel Moger, that niche business model prompted a “moral dilemma” early in the pandemic: encourage travel to the area and risk community health, or shoulder big revenue losses.

“By mid-May, I felt pretty strongly that most events probably shouldn't happen, just from a moral perspective,” Moger says. “100 percent of our clients travel to northern Michigan from other areas, and most of their guests are traveling, too. I had to make a hard choice of saying, ‘Okay, this work may be available to me, but is it the right thing to do?’”

Moger ultimately retained about 25 percent of her usual capacity throughout 2020, with some of her weddings rescheduled to 2021. A mere four of her events manifested in 2020, and even those looked dramatically different and less profitable from pre-COVID weddings. Smaller guest lists, custom masks, hand sanitizer, plated meals rather than family-style serving, and spread-out wedding layouts are all strategies Moger employed. She expects those trends will linger in the industry even as vaccination efforts accelerate -- though she prays for bigger business.

Mammoth Distilling had its own rollercoaster year. In addition to continuing operations at its three pre-COVID locations – in Central Lake, Traverse City, and Bellaire – Mammoth also opened two more tasting rooms (Bay Harbor and Adrian). According to Chad Munger, Mammoth’s founder and president, going forward with those openings during the pandemic added overhead costs and created significant staffing challenges. Munger also says Mammoth shouldered sizable expenses to build out infrastructure for making hand sanitizer, which helped supplement the company’s revenues early in the pandemic but is now an over-saturated market.

The result has been an up-and-down 12 months, with the hardest hits coming in the past few months. Munger says sanitizer sales did enough to get the business through the spring, and notes that pent-up demand and new locations meant the summer season was actually 10-15 percent bigger than the previous year. It wasn’t until November that things got rough.

“The holiday season is when a lot of alcohol is sold – in liquor stores, in restaurants, in tasting rooms,” Munger tells The Ticker. “But then here comes the surge, and we’re starting to close down again, and they’re tightening restrictions. We dialed everything way back, without the advantage of having something like sanitizer to fill the gap. So it’s this last third of the year that's really hit us hard, financially. It took away our strongest quarter.”

Munger says the biggest hurdle of late for restaurants and bars hasn’t been the capacity restrictions, but curfew times. Currently Michigan establishments are not allowed to offer indoor food or drink service past 11pm. Up until March 5, the curfew was 10pm.

“The hospitality portion of the business relies on late-night. We have a big peak in our business between nine and midnight. We were only getting the first hour of that [until recently],” Munger says. “I think people think of distilleries as making a lot of money selling bottles off shelves, in grocery stores or liquor stores. But when you're the size of us, it’s really about selling things out your own front door.”

Busiest Year Ever?
Nowhere else has the boom been felt than in northern Michigan’s real estate market, which hit historic numbers at the end of 2020. Dennis Pearsall, president of Real Estate One’s Northwest Michigan Division, said his team “ended up having a record year in 2020,” closing $560 million in sales versus $495 million in 2019.

Pearsall credits the rise of remote work for the boom. But one consequence of more people flocking to the area is that it’s putting Traverse City’s already strained housing inventory to the test. For 2020, Pearsall says Real Estate One Northwest Michigan was up just 3.5 percent in total closed units, but up 14 percent in dollar volume closed – a reflection of low supply and high demand driving up prices.

It’s not just existing homes, either. Pearsall tells The Ticker that 2020’s vacant land sales were up 42 percent year-over-year in units sold, and 53 percent in total dollar volume.

And numbers for 2021 are looking even stronger. For January and February, Real Estate One’s tally for total units sold was up 30 percent from the same months last year, and dollar volume was up 56 percent. While he’s pleased with the success, Pearsall has concerns about what the continued boom could mean for local real estate prices, affordable housing availability, and overall stability.

“At some point, the bloom is going to be off the rose,” Pearsall says. “You can only have a market that has all these dynamics if you can support the infrastructure and all the needs and demands of that market.”

A more surprising industry boom? Sports trading cards. In January, a 1952 Mickey Mantle card sold for $5.2 million, shattering the record for highest-selling sports card of all time. All told, 14 of the top 15 biggest sports card sales ever have happened in the past year. For card shops like Traverse City’s Nothing But Sports, the phenomenon has helped drive massive consumer interest.

“The hobby has definitely caught on fire in the last year,” says Rich Bannatyne, the store’s owner.

“People were locked in with no live sports, and once things start blowing up on cards – like when the Mantle sold for $5 million – people see that and get back into the hobby. A lot of the people that collected in the ‘80s and ‘90s, they’re coming back because of the way the stuff has been selling. So it does drive people into the store, for sure.”