Yep, it's that delightful season when we're working on the holidays months before other people even think about 'em.
What does that mean to us?
- It means we put together a little press guide in hopes we'll be featured in some news outlets. (that would probably work a lot better if I actually pursued any press outlets)
- It means we have started looking at forecasts for our regular customers like The Gift Oasis, ThinkGeek and UncommonGoods, and even pitching new ideas.
- It means that I've been courting potential new customers like Dot & Bo and The Grommet to see if they'd be interested in picking up our line.
- It means that we've been looking at Amazon sales in Q4 of last year and figuring out how early we can send stock without assessing long-term storage fees.
- It means that we've been scrutinizing our own website sales and trying to eyeball how many of those sales came from WIRED's coverage vs. how many are organic visitors (so we can figure out how many we can expect now that we don't have WIRED).
Last year, we ran out of stock of everything.
It was a brutal season for a lot of reasons, but one of the big 'uns was that we plain old ran out of our best sellers. The other big reason it was a brutal season was because our website kept crashing (a problem we hopefully have resolved by moving to Shopify).
It seemed like last year, we went into the season thinking we had a pretty good handle on what we needed... and then it all went out the window in late November and suddenly it was all chaos.
This year, I don't even have a vague idea of what to expect.
I'm open to ideas... Those of you who have experience in this arena, how do you get ready for the holidays?
