Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

If you have a shop which sells kidswear, go find little fake Christmas trees.

You’ll need them next November 1.

Little kid-can-carry trees that small ornaments can be hung on. Buy them all when you find them. 

It’s gonna be a great holiday promo that will boost not only Christmas sales, but your shop’s community-activity profile as well. 

Now’s ALSO the best time to

plan for next year’s holiday season to be even better than it was this year! Order TGtbT.com’s PDQ of  Holidays in Resale for your advance planning.

More holiday decor items you might want to stock up on, and why.

Okay, why little trees?

Here’s the plan: You want families to remember your shop in November and December. So you build a promotion that will keep customers coming back regularly during this time span.

You start with the beginnings of a season-long giveaway: a little Christmas tree per child.

Each week, you offer something to decorate this tree. Depending on how much time and energy you and your staff can devote to this you can offer:

• A workshop once a week for the kids to make an ornament through materials and lessons offered by your shop.
• A branded “kit” of take-home-and-make supplies with easy instructions.
• A how-to handout per week with an ornament-making idea for kids to try at home.
• A completed ornament for the children to hang on their tree. These could have a theme: Week One, an ornament representing transportation “I’d drive from anywhere to visit MyShop,” Week Two a teeny piggy bank for “I am learning to save money by shopping resale at MyShop,” and so on.

Some notes:

• Be aware of the safety factor: no small parts, no instructions involving sharp knives, ovens, epoxy!
• Be sure your promotion actually promotes your shop with your logo on all kits, instruction sheets, maybe even a sticker sheet for them to fill as they try the various ideas you offer.
• If you are offering an instruction sheet, keep the past weeks’ around so some kids can play catch-up as time goes by.
• (You might even offer a full collection of these ideas as a stocking-stuffer freebie to parents and teachers, or a post-holiday idea book they can use next year.)

Don’t want to deal with those little trees? Vary the promotion by having a big, bare tree in your shop window. The participants can hang their ornaments on your tree and the community can watch the tree become bedecked with a dazzling array of imaginative ornaments. (Bonuses: A great photo-op for local media and a way to bypass the necessity for display changes for weeks! And the week after Christmas? They can bring in their visiting relatives to see the tree they helped build, and then reclaim their ornaments to use on their tree next year.)

So what has this type of promo done for your business?

• Increased traffic in your shop at a time when families might be lured away to the malls and big-box retailers
• Built community involvement and shown community acceptance of your business
• Provided a news-worthy story for the media
• Promoted loyalty to your shop by your clientele by starting a new tradition
• Increased the growth of consumer habits…let’s go to MyShop this week!
• Perhaps decorated your shop windows for little effort and built the appeal of your shop’s location by the tree’s display
• Given consumer families and their out-of-town family a reason to come to the shop between Christmas and New Year’s.

This idea specific to shops which carry childrenswear is from KidBiz: It’s NOT Child’s Play, one of TGtbT.com’s Products for the Professional Resaler