Bringing Business to Retail
Gift Wrapping
Should you buy the gift wrapping? Is it worth outlying the money to gift wrap items in your retail store? By the time you bought the paper and the ribbons, card, somewhere to store it all, not to mention the time it takes to actually wrap the dollars add up. Hey there, Selena from SelenaNight.com and the bringing business to retail podcast here, and today we're talking about whether you should bother gift wrapping in your retail store. [Music] So let me tell you this, tell me about my journey. Right from the start I always offered gift wrapping in my retail stores. To begin with, harking back to the brand paper packages to hide up the string, these are a few of my favourite things. We used brand paper with bakers twine, loads of different colours, and then we branched out to having several different styles of paper, but that started to get really costly because when you ran out of a specific type, and then you have to go and do a minimum order just to get the baby shower or the congratulations paper, it just got to the point where you were ordering for the sake of ordering. Sometimes you would, you try and forecast these things, but sometimes you would run out of the baby girl paper. There was just a run on baby girls, and about this time our brand had a complete overhaul, and part of the package that the designers offered was a choice of different papers that represented what our brand was trying to, how the brand had to be perceived. So whilst I didn't go with the exact paper that they offered because it didn't work for us in store, I found one that was the perfect paper, and it also happened to come in our brand colours. It was simple, it was a unisex, aqua stripe, we had white ribbon to top it off, the problem was it was expensive. And on top of that, a lot of the products that we were selling were they just weren't box, so I'm worried that to be honest they'll go and look crap when they're wrapped in this beautiful paper, and I agonised for weeks over what we should do. So in the end I decided to opt for simple white boxes that could be easily wrapped, and I had this agonising decision about whether I should charge because it was costing me in in actual materials about two dollars. So I opted to charge two dollars fifty for gift wrapping, and I really really worried that nobody would pay, but they do. I let it go for months to see how we went, and in that time we did 250 gift wraps. So I started to track how many people were opting out of gift wraps once that they they were told that there was a charge, and over six months less than five people said no to gift wrapping. So whether you choose to charge or not, that's completely up to you. You may find that your sales increase more than the cost of the paper and the time to wrap. In fact, I know one retailer who started offering free gift wrapping in store about 18 months ago, and not only did it give them a point of difference, but from August to February, they actually have a second person on the counter just to wrap on a Saturday morning. They've got a range of papers, and they tell me that the kids love picking out the papers for the gift for their friend, and the other thing is it actually keeps the people, your customers, in the store longer, because they can see that that's going to look beautiful, and you'd be surprised how many people actually make more purchases while their gift wrapping is going on. So they end up going away and browsing the store while you're wrapping, and then they'll come back with a whole bunch of stuff and pop it on the counter. Score! Anyway, I digress. Wouldn't that be a nice problem to have? And another store owner that I know who offers free gift wrapping but has a selection of beautiful cards that customers can buy. So, I mean, who's going to not get free gift wrapping? And then when you've got free gift wrapping, who's not going to buy a card to go with it? Smart move. So, whether you decide to charge for a gift wrap service or offer it for free, in my experience, nearly every store would benefit from offering a gift wrap service. Do you offer gift wrapping? Do you charge? Let me know in the comments below about what gift wrapping has done for your business. And for more retail strategies, head on over to thecelynandart.com website or subscribe to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast where I interview industry and thought leaders about a range of topics that you can go back and implement in your retail fees. Until next week, I'll see you later. [BLANK_AUDIO]