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Subscription gelato may be one answer to a cool business climate

When impulse buys dropped, Gelateria Uli’s owner had to find a new business model to keep the Los Angeles ice creamery afloat.

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Subscription gelato may be one answer to a cool business climate
Courtesy of Uli Nasibova

It’s summertime, and for many people that means eating more creamy scoops of frozen goodness. But how consumers are buying their frozen desserts has changed a lot for Gelateria Uli, which has two Los Angeles locations along with a production kitchen.

Uli Nasibova is the owner and operator of the business, and she estimates that impulse purchases are down 70%, causing a significant loss of revenue for her company. Nasibova was able to get loans from the Paycheck Protection Program and an economic emergency disaster fund — both through the Small Business Administration — to lean on for now. But relying on outside revenue, she said, can be stressful.

“At my lowest, I started calling people and saying how do I do this?” Nasibova said. “How do I implement this pivot? And a lot of what I’m doing today, none of it is my invention. It’s mostly just taking advice from people.” And that advice includes a new subscription model of monthly curated gelato that Nasibova launched on June 24. Her goal is 1,000 subscriptions, which would generate $45,000 of monthly revenue for her business.

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