My daughter and I have a game we’ve played since she was about 2 years old. That year, we taught her a few Christmas songs. If you’ve never heard a 2-year old sing “Jingle Bells,” you’re seriously missing out. The problem was, by the time she mastered the songs, the holidays were over, and I’m a stickler for keeping Christmas things at Christmas time. The game goes like this: she starts singing a Christmas song in any month that’s not December. I say in a very playful way “Noooooo….it’s not Christmas time.” She sings it, I interrupt her and repeat, “Nooooooo.” It goes on and on like that.
It’s not that I don’t like Christmas. I LOVE it. The snowflakes, reindeer, and fires in the fireplace warm my soul. I just like to keep the holidays in their appropriate season. I don’t want to be hearing “Frosty the Snowman” in September and I may write you a friendly reminder that the holidays have passed if you’re still turning on your lights in February. To be clear – I’ve never actually written anyone a note…just a friendly tease every now and then.
But there’s one place I let the holidays creep into the fall season: planning for gifts. Why? It’s because I have two businesses and we buy a lot of gifts. I want to get my first-choice gifts, and those may sell out if I wait until late November or December to place orders.
To give you some insight here, let me take you behind the scenes at beCAUSE minded – and the planning needed to fill large orders.
We have two corporate gift suppliers that require a 60-90 day notice for their holiday orders. They make two of our most popular items – our artisan mugs and our Pestemal towels. Why do these two companies require an extended lead time?
Let’s start with the mugs. The artisan mugs are handcrafted in Haiti. As you can imagine, handcrafting beautiful pottery isn’t a quick process. When this group gets a large order, they work late into the night, but still, they can only make so many mugs in a day. In addition to this bandwidth challenge, there’s a political challenge they face regularly, related to gas shortages that cause their production to halt occasionally. The start/stop of the operations mean they need more lead time to ensure an order will be completed by holiday.
How about the towels? These are hand-loomed by a Syrian family at a refugee camp in Turkey. Yes, hand loomed. It’s what makes the towels so uniquely beautiful. But, again, there is only so much a person can produce when they are making each item individually. In addition, these have to be shipped overseas, which we do via boat to ensure our products are cost-effective for our customers. This adds weeks to the lead time.
Why do we tell you this? It’s because people rarely think about holiday orders before Halloween. But, if you’re ordering for a large group of employees or clients, this is a mistake. While we placed orders for these items, most of our larger clients don’t have their gift list ready, so we are working on guesstimated numbers. As with most businesses that carry inventory, we want to have enough products to fill our customers’ orders, but don’t want extra inventory on hand. Because we don’t have firm numbers, there’s a good chance we will sell out.
This isn’t true of just our organization. This is true for almost all small businesses. So, if you’re looking for original, artisan-style corporate gifts, let your “holidays during the holidays” go and plan ahead so you have all of the options available to you. This will save you time in the long run, and it ensures you will have your first-choice gift, not just what happens to be available at the last minute.
Need ideas for holiday gifts for your employees? Check out this blog!
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