Why we start planning Christmas in January, and how you can too!

September 15, 2023

The very lovely Emma Jackson Photography asked me to write a blog post about all things business, and I knew immediately what I wanted to share. My year so far has been about 50% Christmas focused and some people think that's wild! Even some retail pals think it's a bit, well, out there. Read on for why you should be doing it too and one of my top tips.

Are you ready to jingle all the way to a successful Christmas season? As a small business owner, it's crucial to start your holiday preparations early, just like we did back on 6th January. In this blog post, we'll delve into the benefits of early planning and share tips on how to get your retail business ready for the festive season.  So what did we do on 6th January? Top tip number one, tick off the "low hanging fruit" - the emails you know you will send at the end of the year. For us it was the "Merry Christmas we're out of the studio now until January" email along with two about our last order dates. Working backwards from a deadline somehow makes it easier.

Why Start in January?

It may seem odd to begin Christmas preparations in January, but if you're in the retail industry, it makes perfect sense. Q4 is where the bulk of your sales, marketing, and product creation happen. For businesses like Betsy Benn, this period can account for a significant portion of the annual turnover, ranging from 32-45%. Planning well in advance ensures you're fully prepared to make the most of the festive season.

The absolute best thing about Christmas for maker sellers is its predictability. As we will doubtless have all moaned when a customer places an order on the 22^nd and wants it to arrive the next day “Why leave it so late, they know Christmas is on the SAME DAY every year”. Well, us makers know it’s coming too, so we have this amazing opportunity to plan.

October in truth is a slow start, but by late November, customers are actively searching for the perfect gifts. So you can really compress Q4 down into an active trading period of about 60 days. You don't want to spend those precious 60 days leading up to Christmas writing product descriptions and emails. 

Sixty days, where your customers are actively looking for the beautiful solutions you have for them.

Sixty days, when you don’t really want to be trying to write product descriptions and emails and creating reels all the time.

Sixty days when you really just want to be saying “here are my beautiful wares, thank you for your custom” or variations on a theme.

Sixty days when you don’t want to be working all the hours god sends in your business, leaving you exhausted or ill, and unable to enjoy your own Christmas.

That’s assuming that you COULD even throw all your waking hours into your business for that time and don’t have, oh, a family, a spouse, pets, and friends that are all important to you and need your time and love. You also have to look after your own physical and emotional health so you can keep trading in January, and be ready for Valentines Day and Mother’s Day etc

And you might also need to make the odd meal so you don’t starve.

But break those sixty days down between January and September and you’re looking at just under seven days per month. A month to write seven days’ worth of Christmassy social media content, a month to film seven reels (if you want to do a reel a day which I think is a bit excessive), a month to write one newsletter (if you want to send one a week) – you can see where I’m going with this.

Which is why we started in January!

It’s not just content that needs to be written, it’s everything of course. Identifying gaps in your product range, sourcing supplies, creating new products, working out costings, photographing products, listing them on your eCommerce sites, outsourcing jobs you can’t do, adding temps to your team – the business list is kinda endless and we haven’t even got to the family list or the self-care list. And maintaining focus on something that seems so far away and has so much in it, well, it’s hard!

Accountability Matters

I was already pining for some kind of accountability group around Christmas prep. For a start, I didn’t want to be the only odd sock (or stocking) in the laundry basket, working on Christmas in isolation. I wanted other odd socks to join me! But there is also nothing like a supportive community to bounce ideas around with, share highs and lows with, or just sit and have a coffee with. I’ve been asked so many times over the past 13 years what advice I would give to anyone starting their own business and it’s always the same. Find someone else starting their own business and hang out with them. No-one understands your journey quite like someone else on the same path.

All that’s to say, when Jenny Pace asked if I’d like to run a Christmas accountability group within her Better Business Collective while she was on maternity leave, I jumped at it! We agreed I’d also open it up to the informal notonthehighstreet facebook group I’m a part of, as not every business in the Collective has such a big Christmas focus and I wanted there to be more than three of us on the monthly zooms I was planning! As it turned out, I wasn’t the only odd sock at all. There were lots of us who wanted to get a handle on planning in this way, so many in fact that we had to limit the numbers we could have on the live calls, with the rest of the group accessing the recordings after the event.

And of course, it was joyous! We covered A LOT of topics. One of my favourites was May’s monthly zoom where we looked at dealing with the stress, resting and refueling during peak trade. It’s an emotive topic and everyone had memories of times they’d not been able to manage the stress, but also tips on how they look after themselves now and the sharing was just so beautiful. As is often the way when you’re creating a presentation, the flow of information can feel one way, but when others receive it the pathways open up and it flows right back to you!

There were some incredibly practical sessions too, and I’m going to share this one with you so you can get a heap of social content out of one piece of writing.

Take your current best seller, or a good selling item you want to promote, and write out the answers to these questions;

• What is it?
• Where did the inspiration come from?
• When did you first design it?
• Are there any special skills or processes required?
• What is it made from?
• Was there anything tricky to overcome when making?
• What tweaks did you make to get it just right?
• Why do people buy it?
• How do people use it?
• Who had the first one (maybe you made it as a gift for a friend)?
• What problem does it solve?
• What emotions does it tap into?
• Any memorable orders or feedback?
• When did it become your best seller?
• How have you developed it since launch?

Put in as much detail as you can, and then go back and make sure you have as many key terms in this long form copy as possible. Anytime you have written ”it’s”, please change that to a key search term if you can.

What you have just written is a blog post. You can either keep the questions in, or add some sentences between your answers to create a flow. Here’s an example of where I did this for our travel memory print.  

Now you can take some extracts from this blog post and turn them into a newsletter or two. You might want to highlight the inspiration story. Or pull out why xxx is such a good gift for xxx.

And in the same week social posts might look like this:

Day 1 – This week we’re throwing a spotlight on one of our favourites… Here’s the creation story.

Day 2 – These are some features/benefits. This is how you could gift this product. It’s really popular with xxx kind of person.

Day 3 – Here’s a BTS of us making this product. Here’s why we still love it.

Day 4 – An anecdote about a standout order for this product.

Day 5 – Customer X bought this for xxx, here’s what they said about it. This kind of feedback makes us feel…..

Day 6 – seeing photos of our product out in the wild makes us feel …. It inspired the creation of this spin off. The features of which are xxx

Day 7 – we’ve loved deep diving on this product, if you want to read more about it head to the blog post here.

A reel of this product being made or packaged or unwrapped would be a lovely addition. Or if you can show footage of anything that inspired it, that would also be lovely.

I chose to publish the blog post I wrote like this back in February because the product I was writing about is not just a Christmas product. But every other piece of connected content is already created and will be published in November to push Christmas sales. And obviously, you can take this formula for three or four products and vary it slightly!

The Countdown Begins Now

If you're worried that it's not January anymore, don't panic. You can still get your Christmas content ready, you just have to prioritize more. Consider joining Jenny Pace's  Christmas Marketing In A Day It's a fantastic opportunity to supercharge your Christmas content plans, and the recordings will be available if you can't attend in person. This is something Jenny runs every year so check in with her for dates and prices.

A final thought.

As a maker, your ideal customers are actively seeking meaningful gifts and festive decor. They want to support independent businesses like yours rather than big corporations. So, don't hesitate to showcase your beautiful creations and let your customers decide if they want to make a purchase. With the holiday season just around the corner, love, joy, and opportunity are in the air.

So, start planning now, and make this Christmas season your best one yet!

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