New year, new look

Do you make New Year's resolutions? Are you vowing to lose 20 lbs, quit smoking, break bad habits? Every year at this time I resolve to make Syracuse Gift Basket BETTER - I retool it. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. By the middle of January we've all recovered from our crazy Christmas season, and all the figures and feedback are in so we can assess what's happening with the company. Call me crazy, but I find it therapeutic to throw everything up in the air once a year and see where it lands.

(Speaking of the Christmas season, we have been asked a lot in the last couple of weeks how we did. With all the doom and gloom in the media right now about the shaky economy, friends, customers and business acquaintances are curious about how we made out. I mean let's face it - gift baskets are more of a luxury item than a necessity. But, we actually managed to maintain almost exactly what we did in 2007. Any other year I'd be a little upset about that....but all things considered, I'm pretty pleased. I was fully expecting to see a significant drop. But I digress...)

One of the nice things about the space we currently occupy is how flexible it is. In the 4 1/2 years we've been here, we've changed our configuration many times. When we moved here, we used the bulk of our space for the public "storefront" area, and less for production. Then we started seeing a trend of more and more of business coming in over the Internet. At one point we were toying with the idea of moving to an Internet only business model and moving the business to a warehouse, so we made our showroom area much smaller and increased our work space.

But, things are always changing....and over the last year we've noticed a big increase our foot traffic. I would still hesitate to call us a true "retail" store (most of our business still comes in over the Internet and by phone), but more and more people are stopping in to check us out and to grab a gift on the way to the hospital or a business meeting. So, we've changed things around yet again...kind of a hybrid of our original plan and our most recent layout. We've increased the display space, but kept some of the extra production area we added. For our customers, it means we are able to have a much bigger selection of our standard gifts made and ready to go. If you're in the neighborhood, please stop in and say hello (FYI - we've been known to have gourmet chocolates or cookies out as samples....not that we're trying to bribe you :-).