It’s off to Dallas Gift Market this week
I sometimes have a customer ask me, “Did you make this. . . (fill in the blank with some cute gift item). I have to laugh…remembering the hundreds of companies we order from and the dozen or so different shows we attend every year to view new merchandise and trends. While it’s fun to see all the new merchandise in the hundreds of thousands of square feet of showrooms, it is also one of the most intense, hard few days of work in my year. In the first place, it’s physically demanding, with lots of walking and standing, standing, standing as you place orders. The sensory overload makes your head spin, and my eyes are fatigued by the end of each day, just trying to take it all in.
More taxing, to me, is the knowledge that the decisions I make in this brief period can make or break the profitability of our business for the rest of the year. Buy too many of the wrong things and your hard-earned money is tied up in merchandise that does not sell, leaving you unable to purchase things that will sell. But get too conservative, and you miss the opportunity to make money by not having the items your customers are looking for (anyone have my crystal ball?).
We saw this first-hand in 2009 when we sold out of Christmas trees by Dec. 14, then spent two weeks turning away potential customers.
And even though you’ve just packed away your Christmas decorations, we’ll be ordering the Christmas merchandise for 2010. The way manufacturers operate these days, they won’t make anything until they have firm orders for it (no one wants a warehouse full of unsold stock), so if you don’t order it in January, you won’t have it in your store this coming fall for Christmas sales.
In addition, I’ll be looking for pots, garden accessories and that special something for Spring.
Wish me luck, and come in soon to watch all the new goodies arrive!