BUFFALO, N.Y. — Spruce on Main was Krista Sobon's pandemic baby.
"During COVID, I live less than a mile from here and I would walk around and I noticed that this plaza was empty," she told 2 On Your Side. "I decided to quit my full time job in advertising and start a new career."
Krista now has two shops in the Snyder plaza on Main, near Harlem. Spruce and Little Spruce sell clothing, decor, accessories and gifts for all ages.
From day one, Sobon has operated her entire business using the software called Square.
"I'm in it constantly. My staff is it in it constantly," she said. "We have three registers, two iPads, and two laptop computers. I also have an app on my phone. All of those are crucial to the business," she said.
Two weeks ago, their Square account stopped working.
"On March 7 around 2 p.m., we started getting getting errors within Square as we were trying to do day-to-day normal functions," she said. "We were trying to print labels for new clothing. We were trying to update inventory, and everything was giving us an error."
This went on for over a week with no solution.
"The problems kept getting worse," she said. "We were getting more errors, registers were crashing often and we had to figure out all these workarounds to continue to stay open and cash out customers."
Krista made repeated attempts to solve the problem through Square's customer service, and even by reaching out to the company's top executives on LinkedIn.
Then on Tuesday of this week, she made a public plea to her Instagram community.
The 10-minute video had an immediate impact.
"I think we're up to 24,000 views on Instagram alone," Krista said. "Square's been tagged over 1,000 times. The comments just about how we needed Square to help us and the support we got from the community was overwhelming."
That night she heard from Square, and 24 hours later their system was back in business.
"Our website's back up, we're able to operate in the store, we're able to catch up over the 15 days that we lost, we were able to catch up on that work," she said. "So yes, it's a very, very happy ending."
In a statement to 2 On Your Side, a Square spokesperson said: "We understand how important it is to never miss a sale and how critical it is that our services are operating as expected. We're thankful for the seller's patience and collaboration while our engineering team worked to get them back up and running."
Krista is crediting the support from her customers for the quick response.
"I don't think we would be operating if it wasn't for their shares, their likes, their comments, their kind words," she said. "I do not think Square would have listened."
She also wants her story to be a lesson for all other business owners.
"Have a backup plan," she said. "I do not have a backup plan. I learned a tough lesson as a business owner. That's my number one priority once we get back up and running and back up to speed, I will be working on a backup plan so that we never put ourselves in this position again."