A gift for the gift giver!
Every year during our busy Christmas season, we like to include a little something when sending out our framed prints. Last year we included some gorgeous Christmas cards by the lovely Dots And Spots along with some yummy chocolates. The response we had from our customers was delightful. They were really touched to receive a little something extra and felt it added a unique festive element to their online shopping experience.
With Christmas approaching we wanted to carry on the tradition – we have a high percentage of repeat customers so we wouldn’t want to disappoint them! We had a ponder about the right kind of gift to give them, that would be universally loved, was perceived as a luxury item and was from a company that shared our brand values and ethics. Our first thought was of Green & Blacks. Not only do we love their entire product range, from bar to ice cream, but we admire and aspire to their ethos and principles – more of which can be read about here.
So using our powers of persuasion and charm, we wrote a little letter to the Green & Blacks marketing team. We knew that they must get lots of requests similar to ours so we needed to grab their attention. We demonstrated why they should buddy up with us over the Christmas season and how great it would be for both our brands to be associated with one another.
We had a big preamble, explaining who we are and what we do and set out our proposition. Then we cheekily listed reasons why they should say yes, which included: • Because you are lovely • Because we are a small, niche, British company developing our own luxury brand and you know all about that • We too use fine organic ingredients that are ethically sourced (but for us that means FSC approved timber frames made by a local family run firm of framers) • Because we will make a lot of customers smile and eat chocolate • Getting a taster of your fine chocolate will remind our customers that they need chocolate for Christmas and will go out and buy yours • You get the feel good factor of knowing that you have supported an up and coming UK designer in her quest to make the world a prettier place • Because Father Christmas will know and will put a “p” for present and not a “c” for coal next to your name on his list.
So it turns out that Green & Blacks rather liked our idea and the lovely Laura in marketing got back in touch to say that they thought our letter was great and that they would be thrilled to support us with our Christmas promotion. Laura explained it wasn’t something they did very often so we felt really honoured that they wanted to partner with us during such a busy trading period.
We are now anticipating a lovely delivery of miniature Green & Blacks chocolate ready to ship out to our Christmas shopping customers! (We think it was the last reason that really swung it for us.) The bars will be included with all our framed prints from the beginning of November, whilst stocks last. Betsy’s absolute favourite flavour is Butterscotch so if we get a lot of those she says we may need an official Keeper of the Chocolate.
In the spirit of giving, we sent Green & Black their very own Betsy Benn Personalised print as a little thank you for their support! We hope you all have a very Merry Chocolate, er we mean Christmas, shopping experience! Love, The Betsy Benn Team xx
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We thought for a long time about whether to have a break, how that would look, what kind of business we would come back to if we did and what our impact is on the other businesses we work with and our customers.
