Essential Steps for Artists and Makers to have a Profitable Holiday Season

How did your Christmas/Holiday selling season go last time around?

Maybe it started out okay, or it got off to a slow start but you were managing. But there’s always a point where things really start to go downhill.

You’re exhausted. You’ve done one too many shows.

You’re juggling wholesale, commission, and website orders, you’re definitely getting a cold, and you’re starting to get those emails about how you’re going to ruin Christmas if you can’t deliver on time.

The holiday season is always going to be challenging to manage because there is just so much more activity going on than in the rest of the year, and we often don’t really have anyone to help with that.

But it can be better than it has been. With a few sensible preparations, you can reduce a lot of the stress, be more proactive earlier in the season, stick to your marketing plan, and *fingers crossed* avoid getting sick for your own celebrations.

In this blog post we’ll look at some essential steps for a successful and profitable holiday season that you can implement whether this is your first Christmas season or you’ve got a few under your belt.

They’re all reasonably quick. They can all be done imperfectly. And they will all help you reduce your stress levels and get through your to-do list faster.

So let’s jump in.

1. Decide on Your Offers

Know the trends

Before the season starts make the final decisions on what you’re going to sell, identify the products that are likely to be the most popular, and those you’re going to be promoting with sales and discount offers.

Understanding the current trends can be helpful, even if you don’t have time to produce any new products. By spending some time researching popular gift items, colours, themes and the types of products that are trending on Etsy, Pinterest and Instagram, you may spot something you’re already selling that could fit.

Knowing the trends will also help you with any last minute PR opportunities. If you can find a way to fit one or more of your products into the trends that editors, bloggers and journalists are likely to be promoting, you’ve got more of a chance of taking part in a last minute promo.

Identify your Best Sellers

Remember that you’ll probably make the majority of your sales from just a few products, so identifying which ones can really help you with planning inventory.

Take a look at your sales data from previous years to identify which products were the best-sellers in past holiday seasons. Try to focus in on just the holiday season, especially if you have products that are popular at other times of the year and might skew your results.

Look for ways to encourage gifting.

Do you have products in your range that are ideal gifts, or that could be if they were paired into a set or packaged into a gift box?

Packaging your existing stock into gift sets, can be a much lower risk way of trying something new at Christmas as you only need to purchase the packaging and you can break them up again if they don’t perform as well as expected.

2. Price for Profitability

Do a Double Check on Your Costs and Pricing Calculations

Selling more of a product isn’t always a good thing. If you’re not making a profit, or not making enough profit, an increase in sales volume will cause a lot of problems for your business.

So before the holiday season starts, take the time to do a double check and see if any of your prices need adjusting. Consider whether any of your material costs, or overheads have increased since you last set your prices, or whether your hourly rate needs to increase to reflect an increase in your skills and experience.

Here are some costs that you can easily forget to include in your prices:

Overheads
Equipment maintenance and replacement
Selling costs such as show stand fees, commission and your labour in marketing and selling your work

And if you’re going to offer discounts, remember that you need a bit of extra wiggle room in your prices.

Offer Discounts Strategically

Discounting can be a good way to increase sales but remember that the purpose of discounting is always to prompt customers to buy today.

They’re a sweetener that encourages people to act now, rather than a way to make your prices more accessible.

To serve that purpose they always need to be time limited, and not available for too long. A few days, or at most a week is plenty.

Bundling items so that customers get a discount when they buy more than one item can also be a strategic way to offer a discount and still increase the customer’s overall spend with you.

Remember to plan your discount strategy in advance so that you’ve got time to really promote your offers on social media and through your emails.

3. Prepare Your Stock Levels

Use Your Past Experience to Decide on Stock Levels for the Season

If you’ve got some experience of the holiday season, use your previous year’s sales data to forecast demand. Consider what has changed in the past 12 months. Have you grown your audience? Has it got more difficult to get their attention?

A good rough estimate can be to take your sales from last year and add on a percentage similar to the growth in your audience.

So if your email list has grown 20% since last year, you could aim to grow your holiday sales by 20% too.

Just make sure that your assumptions aren’t being distorted by large numbers of unengaged followers, or those not seeing your content.

If this is your first holiday season, it’s best to be conservative and treat it as a way to gain experience.

Plan your Restocks

While running out of materials during the peak season can lead to lost sales opportunities, ordering too much is an even greater risk. Once your cash is sitting in materials, you don’t have the flexibility to use it for advertising, stand fees or even just your ongoing bills.

If you overstretch yourself to stock up for Christmas and you get it wrong, you may run out of money in January and not be able to pay your stand fees for the following year, or your business’s ongoing expenses, including your salary.

So it’s important to order conservatively, set up a system or routine to monitor your materials levels, and quickly reorder when you need to.

Identify Multiple Sources for Supplies Where Possible

Relying on a single supplier can be risky, especially during the Christmas season. It’s not unusual for suppliers to run out of certain supplies or not be able to restock them until too late in the season so it’s useful to have a backup source.

If possible, it’s a good idea to identify multiple sources for your supplies to give yourself options. Some may have better prices, some may have faster delivery times, some may have more availability of stock and you can choose the one that best fits your circumstances when you need to reorder.

4. Plan Your Marketing Strategies

Plan Your Social Media and Email Marketing Campaigns

Prepare your content calendar, taking into account key dates for the season, and create outlines for the social media posts and email campaigns you will use.

Don’t forget that your promotions need to be highlighted as much as possible so remember to post and email multiple times about these special offers.

If you’re super organised you could even start writing and scheduling some content in advance. If you’re the kind of person who’s always a bit too ambitious about what you can achieve, instead of writing your posts in chronological order, start by writing and scheduling one for each of the weeks between now and Christmas.

That way, if things get busy, and you get squeezed for time there will still be some content going out.

But remember that this season is short and it’s extremely noisy in your customers’ feeds and inboxes.

Prioritising marketing will always be a wise choice. You can always hold back on your usual admin work, repurpose some content from previous years or spend less time on creating your content (perhaps worrying less about whether it is good enough)

5. Look for ways to reduce the time spent on repetitive work.

Get recurring jobs done with the least effort

With all of the jobs that you do regularly, saving even a small amount of time will soon add up. You can save time by:

Using checklists to get the job done without using too much brain power.
Organising resources such as product images, descriptions, contact details, web URLs, so that you don’t need to go looking for them.
Using routines and timers to ensure that you get the repetitive work done but it doesn’t take all day
Setting out a packing station with everything you need to wrap and ship an order

Take some time to write a list of all the jobs you do repeatedly and look for opportunities to make them quicker and simpler.

Sometimes that means removing steps. Sometimes it means having everything you need close by. Sometimes it means reducing starting friction and brain work by having a clear step by step process to follow (even if you know how to do the job)

Some areas where there is often a lot of repetition are:

Customer Service
Packing Orders
Bookkeeping
Preparing for shows
Listing products on marketplaces

Look for time saving tools

Invest in tools that will save you time and reduce the amount of manual work you are doing.

One of my best ever investments was a thermal label printer. Before using it I would print 4 labels onto an A4 sheet of paper and then cut them and sellotape them to the parcel.

I thought I was doing fine and I didn’t need the printer. Plus it was a little bit more money than I wanted to spend.

But the difference it made was huge! I hated doing the labels previously. I could never find the scissors and it was annoying to have to be sellotaping them on. I would always put it off until last thing and that usually meant I ended up working later than I needed to.

The label printer was a small change that saved me from my own unhelpful behaviour and it was well worth it. Another change I could have made would have been to buy adhesive address labels to use with my regular printer.

6. Get ready for increases in Customer Service emails + DMs

Set your policies

You should already have created your templates for replying to emails. Now you need to know your policies for making decisions.

What will you do if a customer says their parcel is missing but the courier says it might still get there?
What will you do if a customer wants to use a discount code that has expired?
What will you do if a customer is upset because their parcel didn’t arrive before Christmas?
What will you do if a customer wants to return an order?

Decide in advance what you’ll do in the most common situations and the most contentious ones, so that you don’t have to spend brain energy on it when things are busy.

Write your policies down so that you don’t forget what you decided and this document can also act as a useful guide for anyone else helping you with customer service over the holiday period.

Handle Returns and Complaints Professionally

Returns and complaints are always going to happen and during the holidays your customers will be stressed themselves. So they may not always show up as the best version of themselves.

Be patient, don’t take it personally, and try to understand how it must feel from the customer’s perspective.

And, if in doubt, give yourself a bit of breathing room and wait a few hours before replying.

7. Set Realistic Goals

Defining Clear, Achievable Objectives for the Season Based on Past Data Where You Have It

When setting your sales and audience growth goals for the season use as much of your experience as you can. Don’t set yourself a target of 50% sales growth if you’ve never had a holiday season with that level of growth and you haven’t added many people to your audience recently.

And don’t forget to set goals around your actions, as well as just the results. Give yourself targets for the number of social media posts you want to share, the number of emails sent and the number of wholesale customers contacted.

This will help you to identify the extent to which your efforts influence the results and hopefully will be motivating.

Track Progress and Adjust Strategies as Needed

Regularly track progress towards your goals in a spreadsheet and be prepared to adjust your strategy if things aren’t going to plan.

With regular checks ins you’ll be able to quickly identify when sales are below what you hoped and you can add in some more marketing campaigns or adjust your inventory plans.And if you include some self reflective questions about your wellness and mindset in your regular reviews you should also be able to spot when you’re in danger of burning out.

How to implement this if you’re short on time.

So, there you have it. Work on these 7 areas ahead of the festive season and you’ll be in the best possible position to make more money and feel better throughout the season.

How much preparation you do depends on everything else you’ve got going on and what time of year you’re reading this, but if you do any of this at all, things will be better.

If you’re short on time, concentrate on efficiencies (creating templates, processes and checklists) and your marketing strategy. These two areas will give you the biggest impact.

If you’ve got a bit more time available, you’ll be able to more effectively monitor your stock levels, make your products more “giftable” and maybe even write a few marketing emails.

And if you’d like a shortcut to get organised this year, check out Burnout Free Christmas for Makers, a ready-to-use set of Trello boards designed to help creative business owners manage their tasks and time effectively during the Christmas season, so they can avoid anxiety and burnout.

Not familiar with Trello? Don’t worry – I’ll walk you through all the features you need to use the system.