YM Camera’s Robby Yankush: Adapting, Thriving Online

Robby Yankush, vice president of YM Camera, and his dad, Jim Yankush, YM Camera president, are hanging tough. You can learn more about YM Camera at its website.

What are some ways the COVID-19 outbreak has changed your work life?

Being a retail business that specializes in photography and videography equipment, our business relies on store traffic to thrive and grow. We offer many services that rely on people entering our building: group classes, equipment rentals, online printing, and simply browsing our location for a new memory card or tripod. Luckily, we adapted quickly. We reduced our retail hours, and made shopping only by contactless curbside pickup. Any given month our online business was 25 to 30 percent of overall gross sales, but we have surged to website orders being over 60 percent of our business, without a major drop off in overall sales. We are multifaceted in the way that we are nimble enough to change strategy quickly. Customers have embraced placing orders over-the-phone, on YMCamera.com, and by curbside pickup. We have fun with it — we bring hand sanitizer right out to the car for you when you get a new camera! Classes aren’t going anywhere, either. We plan to host online free workshops on our Facebook and YouTube pages. Staying connected is a must, and we are keeping an open line of communication through Facebook, Instagram and email blasts. We have doubled our social media efforts to let people know we are still here!

The amount of love and support we have received from the greater Youngstown area is more than humbling. People are going out of the way to patronize the places they love to shop — and realize that local, brick and mortar stores are a treasure in the days of Amazon and billion-dollar business. I truly believe that we are going to come out of this stronger as a business, and as an industry. YM camera is a healthy company, and will weather this — and we’ll be right here for your next Nikon or Canon camera purchase.

How about your personal life?

Personally, we are taking the steps to social distance and flatten the curve. It has been tough staying in and not making plans, but we are doing our part. Luckily, Ohio has deemed YM as an “essential business” so I have time to focus on making my business better, and I have time to revamp the store for when our showroom and classroom reopen. 

I also bought a skateboard and my wife is realizing how much I like video games.

What steps are you taking to hang tough?

We are staying positive and trying to take on projects that were being set aside.

What advice are you sharing with the people you love?

We’ll get through this. We’re a retail business in Youngstown that’s been continuously operating since 1951 – many people counted us out, but we were thriving before this, and have no plans to stop our upward trajectory. Times are scary, but there is an end in sight to all this. Through it all, I think we can take a step back and look at the things we love.