You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. As you've been hearing all along on Bloomberg. Many industries of course impacted as a result of the virus. Looking forward to our next guest room. Griffith is chief executive officer at Lantza and he joins us on the phone from Long Island, New York. So nice to have you here with Jason and myself. First of all, Um, we hope you're doing well, your family
as well your workers. Give us a little insight into how your world personally and professionally has changed. Well. One of the things that has changed for us has definitely been the workforce and how we're managing things, um, And thanks a lot for the question on that's a little bit different depending where we are in the world. We have offices in Asia and Europe and here um. For our workers in Asia, they're actually on their way back
to work, UM. Japan business has been picking up. Our sourcing office in China, UH is starting to come back in and where we're originally thought supply chain was going to be a big problem, we see very very few issues there, if any Uh. In Europe and in Wisconsin where we're based, UM, we are on many of the employees are working from home. Staggered staff if you're in the office, uh, and the warehouse is still working and
shipping product out. But let's again on staggered staffing. UM. And in New York where we have a small design office, Uh, people there are home and working from home. Everybody is getting used to working on teams by Microsoft. Everybody's getting used to working on FaceTime. People are actually finding that they're having some pretty good conversations digitally and making decision staffs and moving on personally. I had my whole family
in the house today. Everybody's out of New York and is working from home, and we're just looking for rooms to have conference calls in exactly. I think we're all doing that. I had to put an on air sign on my you know, I'm broadcasting from my daughter's bedroom, so you know, uh, you know, this is what we're doing these days. UM. So Jerome, help us understand sort of your customer at this point, because we know you're
in touch with them as well. You know, brick and mortar stores are closed, I believe, UM, but you know online continues, what what are you seeing as you sort of get down into the customers sphere. Yeah, with the stores, we have twenty six stores, so not not a very large store base, and and we've closed that over the weekend.
I'll be closed for a few weeks. Online or online customer has been very robust at the end of twenty nineteen and then for the first few fiscal weeks of up until about ten days ago, where we started to see people's um demands slow down and really changed rapidly day by day. UM. I think that people are much more focused, or happened in the last few days of
just you know, can I get the basic essentials? I believe over the course the next few days, as people start to see that, you know, you can get food, you know you can go in the grocery store and get chicken and toilet paper, You'll be fine. Um, there, their lives were going to start to turn to now this is the new norm for the time being. How do I manage through? So? Uh, you know, we're staying on a day by day We are seeing some people uh enticed by discounts a little bit, but that's not
what we're really looking at right now. I think it's important that people have the opportunity to shop from home and from the safety of their own homes. But at the same time, I don't think it's right to take advantage of any difficult situation. You know, it's interesting. I want to go back to what you said about China. Give me an idea, because we had a story in the magazine last week that was trying to that. You know, the question is is China really getting back on track?
Because from what we from what our reporters found out is that, you know, yes, energy usage is up, which is a key indicator to figuring out what's going on in the Chinese economy. But we're also hearing that there are projections that factories have to hit in terms of energy usage, and that there are just people going in and turning on the lights. From what you're seeing, what can you really clearly tell us about how much they've
gotten back? Because I think the Chinese story does help us maybe hopefully figure out how we get back and how long it takes. Well for us, it's really two stories. One is China, but also one is Japan. Um On the China side, Uh, we had had been very worried about supply chain straightaway, having said that China only represents about of our production worldwide. Um, the guys were late,
definitely getting back from Chinese New Year. But as we looked at production schedules and have been working with the factories directly, we're finding that almost everything is going to be on time or up to two or three weeks late, which is actually okay for us from delivery standpoint. UM. Japan was a little bit of a different story where we had an ongoing business in Japan and we ship out of Yokohama, which is where they had the large cruise ship was quarantined for quite some time. Uh, many
of our employees ended up working from home. They weren't coming into the office. We had customer service reps which were working from home on laptops, and that went on for several weeks. But they're coming back into work now. Is the cases of on down to you know, small numbers or even zero in some cases. So we see, you know, it's like far as law. You know, there's
the curve. There's a curve going up and there's a curve going down, and it seems as though Asia is on the other side of the curve right now, And are you seeing anything in terms of your own sort of worker population in terms of cases and things like that, and how are you managing that? Only got about forty seconds. We haven't seen any I was saying to my family today.
It's interesting. You know, we talk every day. I think communication is you must be up tenfold in the last two days, and we have seen or heard of no one. Now you have to knock wood on that and realize most of our guys were in Wisconsin, which is not really a hot spot. Yeah, exactly, all right, Well, we really really appreciate it. I hope you come back and visit with us at a time when we're not just talking about the virus. You've got some really interesting collaborations.
We didn't get to talk about Reese Witherspoon. That's a miss on us. And you've got some interesting stuff going on in brick and mortar as well. Jerome Griffith is the CEO of Lands and Johnny us on the phone bunker down with his family as we all are. He's out on Long Island. We need to do an extended podcast, and and he's got a fascinating background too. He worked it to me so a lot to get into their we helpful, come back and visit with us