Economy Candy: A Legacy of Sweets and Success Through Three Generations

We recently visited Mitchell and Skye Cohen at Economy Candy to explore their business history and WooCommerce usage. During our New York trip, we filmed a brief interview, available below or on our YouTube channel. For the complete story, continue reading for all the sweet details of their success. 🍬🍭

[embedded content]

Note: Some quotes have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Economy Candy started in the 1930s as a penny sweets cart outside a shoe and hat repair shop in New York City.

Since then, the Cohen family has transformed it into a Lower East Side staple — with Rivington and Essex named after Mitchell’s grandfather — and a national distributor of global treats. Now, Mitchell Cohen and his wife, Skye Greenfield Cohen, carry on that legacy.

“Starting before he could even see over the counter, Mitchell would work with his dad behind the register standing on a milk crate, tallying bills and calculating the change in his head,” Skye shared.

Skye has also maintained an important tradition: ensuring her husband continued the family business, just as Mitchell’s mother and grandmother did for their husbands.

Their latest evolution included an upgraded ecommerce strategy in March 2020. When they revamped their website, which coincided with Covid-19 closures, they also updated their store operations.

Economy Candy brought nearly 2,500 SKUs online, live syncing their inventory management, and began using shipping and local pickup options to maintain business (and customer satisfaction) through the pandemic and beyond.

Family-run business since 1937.
From push cart to nationwide shipping.
Reached almost 10,000 online transactions in 2023.
Their website accounts for 20 to 25% of annual sales each year.
Live syncing of inventory of nearly 2,500 SKUs.

Economy Candy has endured significant global and local challenges in its 88-year history, yet they’re still thriving. Their lasting presence is largely due to their commitment to customers, maintaining product accessibility through tough times.

Over the past five years, they’ve added nearly 500 new products to their inventory — now boasting 2,500 different sweets and goodies.

Reaching 2,500 SKUs required an operational shift: all inventory operations previously resided in Mitchell’s mind.

“Up until the pandemic, all of Economy Candy’s inventory was stored in Mitchell’s head,” Skye shared. “Our staff had to memorize the prices of all 2,000+ items we carried because we were still using dumb cash registers where the price of each item had to be manually entered. In 2021 we took a leap into the 21st century and upgraded to Square digital registers.”

Their modernization coincided with the pandemic, which highlighted the need for efficient (and online-friendly) inventory management. Unable to bring staff in-store, Mitchell and Skye moved all sales online, managing fulfillment themselves.

In 2021, they added Square digital registers and implemented barcode scanning, using Thrive to sync in-store sales with their ecommerce business.

Economy Candy has been online since the early 2000s. In their search for a solution unrestricted in functionality or growth, they switched platforms several times until 2015 — when they found WooCommerce.