We Did It!

Routinely the very hardest time of year for us is January. Why? Business is generally down to a crawl, and we are burnt crispy after the holiday season. What we'd love to do is take a couple of weeks off (or burn the shop down), but what we have to do is wrap our brains around our most (not!) favorite time of the year. You know, the February holiday that's all tacky red and lacey, and full of corny stuffed animals, expensive flowers that last a day or two, and mountains of bazillion calorie chocolates. And bear in mind that red is one of our least favorite colors to design with.....
But okay, we're game. It has to be done. Looking through the product catalogs helped a little, and we put in our orders, with some new stuff thrown in to spark ours and everyone else's interest. Julie tried to be encouraging..."You know we always do better when we have new things to work with!" I wasn't so sure. Summoning up that creative gene again so soon after Christmas is always like pulling teeth (painful!)
Then a Really Funny Thing happened when our new Valentine's Day stock started to arrive. We began to feel cautiously excited as we opened each box, and the little light bulbs started going off in our heads. New design ideas! Yes! We forged ahead, gave ourselves some deadlines, arranged a photo shoot, and jumped in. As I've said before, Julie and I work pretty well together most of the time. When the pressure's on, we kick into creative overdrive, and usually come up with some great gifts. We bounce alot of ideas off each other, and even finish each other's designs when one of us is stuck. It works for us.
So we were off and running, and within a few days we found ourselves with 2o new gifts for the Dreadful Holiday. Roses, bears, chocolate, red. All of it. We sat back, looked at our work, and liked it! And then we tried to figure out just exactly why we had so much fun doing it.....?
If you'd like to check out our new Valentine's Day creations, go to syracusegiftbasketcompany.com or click on the link provided here.

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!