Managing Christmas Gifts Begins at New Year
Retailers preparing for the Christmas season should begin their preparations the day after Christmas, or right at the beginning of the new year. That’s not to say you won’t have other seasons to manage between Christmases, nor does it mean that you won’t have seasonal specials to manage in the mean time. What it does mean is that you should start your Christmas planning cycle and managing Christmas gift ideas as early as possible.
Let’s think about it for a minute. What typically happens right after Christmas? Items go on sale. Your left over Christmas inventory.
Keeping in mind that much of that inventory will not be as popular next year as it was this year, you could have avoided the necessity of markdowns had you ordered the right amount of product. But, of course, you can’t predict what’s going to be in demand three months, or six months, out when you start your Christmas ordering. What you can do, however, is look at last year’s sales numbers and customer traffic and make a good estimate about how many people you might need to serve, what kind of products they tend to like and their Christmas gift ideas & preferences.
Keep Your Retail Management Mind Open
Whether you operate a department store, jewelry store, sporting goods store, or another type of retail outlet, you’ll need to understand your customers. And that means having a customer relationship management tool that you can use to know about past purchases, preferences, spending habits, and much more. You can use this tool year round to better understand every customer that walks in your door. Any information you gather is useful for Christmas shopping and product stocking.
The different aspects of retail management for the Christmas season that are affected by how your retail operation runs the rest of the year include:
- OTB planning
- Customer relationship management
- Accounting
- Budgeting
- E-commerce
- Product ordering
If you train your management to develop a bird’s eye view of your retail operations year round, all of these aspects of your operation will be easier to run at Christmas time when the business is much more hectic than at other times of the year. When sales peak, that’s not the time to think about efficiency and the components that will impact the bottom line. You should start thinking about that during the lull right after Christmas and begin preparing for the next Christmas season.