INDIANAPOLIS — Five months ago, Jayson Manship cleared out of all the games and puzzles from his Moonshot Games store in Noblesville.
“We are in the process of moving all of these games to my home,” Manship told 13News in March as he was emptying his store and putting the games in his pickup truck. “I have a barn at my house, and we're going to turn my home into a delivery system for the game store.”
At the time, Manship said that because of the then-new coronavirus restrictions, he feared he’d have to go out of business forever.
“We're just trying to survive right now,” Manship said at the time.
Then, something unexpected happened.
Manship's online sales of board games and jigsaw puzzles started climbing and climbing. Soon after the stay-at-home restrictions hit back in March, Moonshot started boasting record sales numbers.
“I would say I'm very optimistic now,” Manship said. “We've been thriving through this pandemic."
According to Manship, the store has seen record sales for last three months during the pandemic.
"People are buying games to play at home because they can't go out and see movies and things like that. Games are having a massive resurgence," Manship said. "With puzzles, the manufacturers can't keep them in stock. So we're buying as much as we can get, then selling them as fast as we can."
Thanks to the sales, Manship was able to not only reopen his Noblesville shop, but he was also able to open a new location downtown called Moonshot on Mass Ave.
“We were the only place in town that had puzzles for sale,” Manship said. “We started getting calls from all over: There was a day we did $10,000 in puzzle sales in 24 hours, and that was a big move for us as a small business.”
And Manship's taking every safety precaution to make sure both of his gaming stores stay open.
“We think we're the safest local game store around,” Manship said. “We're taking steps that no one else is. One example: We've got these plexiglass dividers in between players. We're spacing out tables six feet apart. We're doing everything we can to create social distance. We've installed hospital-grade air purifiers. We've got cleaning robots. We've gone above and beyond in terms of just really making sure that our players feel safe.”
This is a true small local business, COVID-19 success story.
“We do believe that game play is important,” Manship said. “We don't consider ourselves essential, but we definitely think we're very important. Mental health is huge, and when people are struggling with all the challenges of the world today, having an escape, having an opportunity to just play is something we fight for every single day.”
