Ten Things We Learned...Holiday Post-Mortem
1. If all of your large corporate orders come in after December 1, you should know you're in deep doo doo.
2. When you're surrounded by green and red, accepting a $5000 order for orange and blue gifts a week before Christmas will put you over the edge in any number of weird ways.
3. Filling your store fridge with lo-cal foods does actually equal weight loss during the holidays, even if you're awash in a sea of good chocolate. BIG Happy Dance!
4. Instead of being annoyed, be happy that a competitor actually has the time to crank call you in December.
5. We've learned that seasonal help will make or break us. Finding out what each person is really good at is key, and drastically cuts down on the dreaded "tweaking". (I'd really rather make it from scratch than fix it!)
6. Prepping really does save your butt, especially when everything is last-minute. This year we de-tagged, pre-cut, pre-bowed, pre-filled, and pre-messaged ourselves silly.
7. Our logo apron, purple crocs, dress jeans and white shirt "uniform" was one of the best ideas we've had. Besides being super comfy, there was no "what do I have to wear that is clean, not wrinkled, and matches" dilemma every morning. Our favorite dry-cleaning man, Frank Principato even picked up, laundered and starched, and delivered our shirts for us! How great is that?
8. We've learned that when we have 100 plus shippers on any given day, we need to give UPS a "heads-up". They tend to freak.
9. When your son calls and reports there is nothing to eat at home except stale marshmallows, it's time to squeeze in a trip to the grocery store to pick up something besides the 250 bags of Lindt Truffles you need to fill an order.
10. We learned, to our dismay, that corporate and private customers are still mistakenly placing orders with "syracusegiftbaskets.com", thinking they are ordering from us. We are seriously, seriously not the same company.
With all this being said, it's onward and upward to Valentine's Day, as well as several other projects we have simmmering. As we jump into our 7th year, we take the good and the bad, learn what we can, fix what we can, and try to do everything better!
2. When you're surrounded by green and red, accepting a $5000 order for orange and blue gifts a week before Christmas will put you over the edge in any number of weird ways.
3. Filling your store fridge with lo-cal foods does actually equal weight loss during the holidays, even if you're awash in a sea of good chocolate. BIG Happy Dance!
4. Instead of being annoyed, be happy that a competitor actually has the time to crank call you in December.
5. We've learned that seasonal help will make or break us. Finding out what each person is really good at is key, and drastically cuts down on the dreaded "tweaking". (I'd really rather make it from scratch than fix it!)
6. Prepping really does save your butt, especially when everything is last-minute. This year we de-tagged, pre-cut, pre-bowed, pre-filled, and pre-messaged ourselves silly.
7. Our logo apron, purple crocs, dress jeans and white shirt "uniform" was one of the best ideas we've had. Besides being super comfy, there was no "what do I have to wear that is clean, not wrinkled, and matches" dilemma every morning. Our favorite dry-cleaning man, Frank Principato even picked up, laundered and starched, and delivered our shirts for us! How great is that?
8. We've learned that when we have 100 plus shippers on any given day, we need to give UPS a "heads-up". They tend to freak.
9. When your son calls and reports there is nothing to eat at home except stale marshmallows, it's time to squeeze in a trip to the grocery store to pick up something besides the 250 bags of Lindt Truffles you need to fill an order.
10. We learned, to our dismay, that corporate and private customers are still mistakenly placing orders with "syracusegiftbaskets.com", thinking they are ordering from us. We are seriously, seriously not the same company.
With all this being said, it's onward and upward to Valentine's Day, as well as several other projects we have simmmering. As we jump into our 7th year, we take the good and the bad, learn what we can, fix what we can, and try to do everything better!
posted by Marcia at 11:09 AM
2 Comments:
I received a gift basket from your company (the lavendar spa basket)and it was delightful! I feel like I should tell you a story about a basket I received from another company not long ago that I also thought was nice until I went into a DOLLAR TREE store with my little girls for our weekly lipgloss and nail polish shopping trip and discovered that every thing from that basket came from the dollar store! Now I am not an ungrateful person but I know that the person that gave me that basket would be upset to know that the basket (that I am sure that they spent a lot of money on) was full of dollar store items. It made me appreciate the unique items in your basket even more. The problem with ordering gifts and flowers and things like that is that the giver doesn't always see what it really looks like. Thank you for not taking advantage of that-and for taking so much pride in what you do.
Maria,
A belated thank you for taking the time to leave the nice comment! We were so focused on making Valentine's Day happen that I, for one never noticed your comment until today. I also just spent 10 days on the West Coast caring for my dear sister-in-law...the blog was the last thing I was thinking about. And Julie's had her hands full holding down the fort without me until just a few days ago. Anyway, we apologize!
We do often wonder if customers appreciate how fussy we are about what we put into our gifts. When we say we believe our gifts should always be something special, we really mean it!
Unfortunately, you're right when you say that customers rarely see the gifts they are sending. I guess that's how companies putting out less than quality products manage to stay in business. A gift recipient would rarely if ever say anything negative to
someone who has been thoughtful enough to send a gift.
It's really nice to know that someone appreciates the difference.
Thanks again for the positive reinforcement of what we do!
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