It’s been a crazy few years, no question. The pandemic boosted peoples interest in cooking and our business benefited from that. Now, there has been a consistent growth in interest in vintage cookware products for the last decade we’ve been selling Revere Ware parts; we averaged 10% revenue growth between 2010 and 2019. Then, in 2020, we saw a 35% revenue growth. 2021 retained the higher revenue level of 2020 and added another 11%. So far this year, we are down 10.5% from last year.
There has been a lot of discussion about whether the lifestyle changes the pandemic saw (like working from home) would stick around for the long term. Given the amount of activity this year has seen (people are doing lots of activities and spending plenty of time away from home) I would have thought we’d see a steeper revenue drop over last year, but that isn’t the case. The winter season sees our strongest sales, so that will tell us more. For now, it seems like people’s interest in cooking is sticking around.
As another data point, our website traffic is down about 10% from last year. While there are lots of things that affect website traffic (like Google changing its algorithms which it does several times a year), taken as face value this is in line with the slightly lower interest we have seen. Our website traffic levels had also been heavily inflated by the pandemic, as you can see here.
