Читати українською

Business relocation across Ukraine facilitated by Reform Support team

“We spent the whole time in a bomb shelter, when it started,” remembers Olena Vynokurova. “I have two children. Our youngest was a year and a half… he was in winter clothes, shoes and diapers all the time. We left Severodonetsk, which is currently occupied by Russian forces, on the seventh day of the war, when Grad rockets hit our house.”

Olena is the owner of Spetstent, a tent producer, which has been relocated to a safer region of Ukraine in May 2022. It was the second time in their lives, when she and her husband had lost their home and successful business.

The first time was in 2014. They had set up a call centre for the banking sector, covering the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. The war started, all banks left and they had to leave their business and move to Kharkiv, where Olena’s sister lived.

“My sister worked for a company that sewed trade tents. We analysed this segment for the Luhansk region and decided to come back to our home and start our technical sewing production there. It was completely new for us,” says Olena.

The couple started with two machines and an office of just 30 m² but within a year they had learned to create patterns, develop a website and promote their products.

Irony of success

To give their business as much chance of success as possible, Olena and her husband decided to try ProZorro, an online procurement platform where businesses could publicly place their bids. It was set up by the EBRD, the Ukrainian Ministry of Economy and Transparency International, with funding from the Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Sweden and the EBRD Ukraine Stabilisation and Sustainable Growth Multi-Donor Account (which comprises Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the European Union, the largest donor).

“ProZorro was such a novelty in those days. It was a turning point for us – we realised that we could not only sew standard items like tents, but also take individual orders from ateliers and other customers. Plus, we could also provide our services throughout the country, not just in our region,” Olena recalls. “We also found new and larger clients, such as local government agencies, enterprises and regular end consumers. We rented a 200 m² building and employed 10 people.”

The couple invested all they had into their business and bought high-quality equipment, which enabled them to design patterns independently and save plenty of production time. Money was just a tool to achieve their dream, but the war showed the irony of this calculation.

“I am so sad that I have never been on vacation with my son. He is now nine years old, and I had always promised him that we would definitely go,” Olena reflects. “But we chose a different path. It was our dream to have our own production business, so we took out a loan and bought premises of 800 m² in the city centre in February 2021. Within a year we had paid back over half of the loan, finished repair works, moved all our equipment there and almost installed solar panels.”

That was how their 2022 began…

Relocating to safety

Then, in the February, Russia invaded Ukraine. The family took their children, a bag containing passports and baby food and escaped to Mukachevo, Transcarpathia, near the border with Romania, where they live now.

“After a few months we came to our senses, realised that our city was occupied and destroyed. Our friend told us about a programme for business relocation that had evacuated his business from Lysichansk. I called the Reform Support Team (RST) from the Ministry of Economy, who were very happy to help us. It was May already and the city was under severe fire,” Olena tells.

The RST is embedded in ministries and public agencies to manage the day-to-day implementation of sectoral reforms, as well as the transformation of the country’s public services. The team is part of the Ukraine Reforms Architecture (URA) project. During the first year of the war the RST helped various businesses to relocate from invaded areas to safer regions of Ukraine. The URA is supported by the EBRD’s Ukraine Stabilisation and Sustainable Growth Multi-Donor Account.

Taras Bursak, Senior Expert at RST explains: “In terms of business relocation, we coordinated the process from requesting relocation to documenting and reimbursing costs. We also found transport for relocation and helped find premises where the relocated business could temporary store its belongings.”

However, much more went on behind the scenes, he adds, such as finding removers, helping with road check points, transferring keys, handling force majeures, providing psychological support.

Olena gratefully recalls: “We had everything agreed – removers, packing up, the car. Then the driver called and told us he wouldn’t go… We called RST: ‘Shall we cancel it?’ – ‘No way! Take our car!’”

“They helped us with everything, otherwise we wouldn’t have risked it at all. Without them, we would not have our sewing business now.”

RST helped Spetstent relocate its business to Dnipro, organise the warehouse to stock its equipment, while Olena and her husband thought about how and where to work.

Taras explains: “The logic is in the short leg to Dnipro. You can make three runs there, while to more distant places only one can be done. The premises were provided thanks to a personal agreement between Denys Shemyakin, Director of RST, and the owner of the warehouse. There was very strong mutual support from the population; without it our project would not have been successful.”

Finally, the company found premises in Vyshhorod, near Kyiv, and moved the production there. “From Dnipro we transferred everything to Kyiv by Ukrzaliznytsia, the rail company”, Olena continues. “RST helped us find cars and load them in Dnipro to transfer from the warehouse to the railway and then helped us prepare all the documents so we could be reimbursed quickly. Unfortunately, we couldn’t relocate our amazing team.”

New challenges met them in Kyiv: black-outs. So to diversify risk and be able to work, Spetstent opened a few more production facilities across Ukraine – in Kharkiv and Mukachevo.

We will succeed no matter what

For now, Spetstent is focusing on technical sewing. Olena and her team work with international organisations, including the UN and Red Cross. They have also made tents for the Points of Unbreakability project and worked with humanitarian and volunteer organisations. Sometimes they volunteer and produce at cost price.

“Of course, from time to time we miss our home,” admits Olena. “We didn’t get anything for free; we started with 30 m² and then expanded to 800 m² with huge efforts and resources invested, so of course it hurts us a lot.”

But she remains positive. “This situation allowed us to reconsider our business model – we realised that it’s possible to work from anywhere and now we have experience and support to scale up further. Therefore, I believe that we will succeed no matter what.”