by Administrator
18. August 2008 05:49
If you're in retail, you both love and hate the holiday season. It's the busiest two months of the year, with some businesses doing 70% of their annual revenue just in those 60 days. You love it for the obvious reason that business is typically steady all week. People are generally in a better mood and your numbers keep going up. Over all, it's just a fun and exciting time to be in the business (especially MY business).
Then there is of course the side that you don't see if you're not in my industry, and that is all the planning, preparing and ruined shoes from all the in-store resets. Prepping for the holidays takes place months in advance. Many months. For me it entails ensuring my allocation of the worlds great wines are arriving on time, getting my hands on new and exciting things to offer my customers, making sure they hear about those things, and training my staff to make sure that every single person walks out with exactly what they're looking for (which isn't to hard, as I truly believe we have the best team in the midwest). So needless to say, there are a lot of meetings, thousands of emails, and even some hair pulling, but every year it gets better and better.
Every industry has its battle flags, its flares that signal the coming of the busy season. In my business, its the new vintage release of the great CA wines (Phelps, Opus etc). All of which are landing in the next thirty to sixty days. What a lot of people don't know however is that wine is one of the few industries whose best sales are a few months prior to christmas. Most collector wine is almost always offered as a pre-arrival sale. Meaning that you take orders before the product arrives, but run it at a much lower price. These are some of the best deals in the industry. You could easily save 20-25 dollars a bottle, or well over 100.00 a case. Not to mention the fact that these are very limited production items, and once they are gone, they're gone. Forever. So if you know someone who is a collector, or are yourself, capitalize on these opportunities when you can. Especially if the wine hasn't been rated yet, because as we all know, that can drive the price through the roof . . or the floor.
Cheers!
