Business Gift Baskets

Do You Have Flair?

Beyond the curling ribbon and sparkly cellophane, a well-proportioned gift basket can make even a few items pop with celebratory delight. However, there’s a knack to placement, similar to flower arranging.

To improve your skills:

• Study catalogs that feature gift baskets to gain a better understanding of items and arrangements.
• Check out craft books or basket-making videos.
• Take a community education course, usually offered for a nominal fee over a couple of nights or on a weekend.

Getting Started

To understand the magnitude of this multi-million dollar industry, attend gift basket seminars at various fancy food and gift trade shows around the nation. You’ll network with wholesalers and experience firsthand how many options you can include in your baskets, pricing strategies, what the trends are popular and other valuable tips.

Then:

• Talk with prospective clients, such as realtors, account executives, multi-level marketing agents and other small businesses to discover the types of customers they’ll send baskets to.

• Visit other gift baskets shops in your area to see what they offer and determine what their clientele might be. Some shops specialize in mass produced gift baskets or occasion gift baskets, like new arrivals or weddings, while others might be direct competition for your business.

• If you’d like your business to be online, visit E Commerce to start the process.

• Secure a business license and a resale number.

• Establish a shipping account.

• Create business cards and brochures.

The amount of inventory you start with will dictate how much funding you’ll need to get off the ground. Visit How To Start a Gift Basket Service for more pricing details.

Inventory for Business Gift Baskets

There’s a great temptation to buy a large quantity of diverse items upfront to use in business gift baskets. Try to resist!

Better to first listen to what your clients want to offer their clients and then buy at wholesale the items that will really move quickly so you aren’t always wrestling with a huge inventory.

What you will always need:

• Baskets and special containers
• A variety of ribbon and bows
• Base material, such as packing straw, for item placement
• Cellophane for wrapping the baskets
• Gift cards
• Scissors, glue/glue gun, tape, etc…

Business gift baskets can be stacked with just about anything: gourmet or casual, from nuts and sweets to wine and motivational books. However, until you have a better understanding of your client base and the businesses they give to, keep your costs down by allowing for flexibility in your item selection.

For example, if you have a customer that knows their client is a red wine enthusiast, either let your customer purchase the recommended wine to add to the basket, or buy a case at a reduced cost from a wine distributor and use the remaining for future baskets.

Suggest that your clients fill out a checklist, based on their understanding of their client and how they want to acknowledge them. This will help you monitor your inventory requirements on a regular basis and create just the right business gift basket.

Marketing

Your business-to-business marketing efforts will be more concentrated than mass marketing efforts and probably require more face time, but will pay off in the long run.

A few marketing tips include:

1. As mentioned above, talk with a variety of other business professionals to let them know of your service.
2. Speak and display your wares at chamber of commerce functions, business breakfast meetings and industry specific gatherings.
3. Donate business gift baskets to fundraisers and include plenty of your business cards.

Full time or part time, creating business gift baskets is a flexible, enjoyable occupation that can be as large or small as you choose.