Retail Holiday Preparation
Here’s a behind the scenes break down that goes into the preparation for the holidays in a retail business.
If you’ve never worked in retail (or manufacturing), Christmas for retailers is the craziest busiest time of the year, but also the most necessary sales boost needed to bring a company out of the red and back into the black.
And in small business in the middle of the Pacific Ocean it’s even a bigger deal! We talk about the holidays from the minute it’s over in January and then we begin planning again mid way through the year from June. So, we’re basically preparing for Christmas for at least 6 months in the year! ;p
We’ve planned ahead as we learned over the years that there are supply chain shortages, distribution challenges, not enough storage space and long work days.
Even now with 8 years of experience as a company under our belt and improvements made year after year, we are faced with new challenges post-pandemic.
It’s not business as usual. In addition to the above, this year we are really short staffed as their seems to be an island-wide labor workforce challenge, greater than usual cost increases we are trying to do everything we can to not have to pass it on to our customers, and “post-traumatic stress” of possible burn out.
Our team has re-dedicated ourselves to live a more peaceful life which means as a small business manufacturer and retailer, to not do what the world expects and work 60+ hours per week, but instead, find some sort of work life rhythm where we can go home in peace and return to work with a peace of mind. We also want to give our customers the peace of mind that we will not compromise quality and will continue to serve them authentically.
So that means, we have to do yet another round of preparations past the usual. That means, we had to stop, take a break from the day to day, and sit down together to make sure we could share our worries and fears and come up with solutions as well as our excitement and a mantra to keep us focused on our shared goals. We had to make plans to discuss as a team what this year would like, what we need to let everyone know, and make sure we’re all on the same page with what we need to do.
There will be some changes at Choco le`a this holiday season, but they are GOOD changes. And because of it, even though we’ve been 4 months into planning Christmas 2022 and 2.5 more months to go, we have some peace about it. :)
erin’s tip
When prepping for a big holiday or event, meet with your team to first hear them out and explore options together. Then come up with a mantra that will remind you all in the moment what you agreed on. For us at Choco le`a, you may hear us shouting to each other, “We got this!” #christmas2022
