Your Indie Business Christmas Checklist
As any small independent business knows, Christmas is the most important time for revenue and exposure. When this one season becomes the focus of your job, it really does feel like it comes round quicker every year!
Here at Drawn Together Art we have devised a checklist to minimise last minute stress and make this Christmas your most successful yet!
Start planning in summer! Yes, this may sounds ridiculous, but many craft markets open up applications for their Christmas Markets around this time of year. Make sure you sign up to their mailing lists and their social media pages to ensure you don’t miss any events you’d like to get involved in. While you do this, make a brief plan - what stock do you need to get ready for this season? If you have specifically Christmas themed items, we’d recommend you start making them now.
Sale or not to sale? Some businesses like to kick off the Christmas season by doing an online sale in September or October. This can get the ball rolling on your Christmas sales. Be careful not to run the sale close to peak ‘Christmas shopping season’ (mid-November onwards) as you may devalue your products.
Business cards and flyers. Make sure you have plenty of promotional material for this season. This is the time of year where although you may not make an immediate sale at a market, customers will be looking for future reference. Always keep one spare business card, and ask people to photograph it if they want to take your details. Also make sure you put business cards in with orders from your online shop so customers can easily order from you again.
Etsy SEO. If you sell on Etsy make sure you’re up to date with their algorithms - these change regularly, and you don’t want this to interfere with your Christmas sales. Make sure you check the Etsy website or Etsy forums about any updates in October. You can also check how successful your listings are with Etsy Rank.
Card Machine! If you sell at markets and you don’t accept card payments, make sure you change this! Trust us, we now take over 90% of our sales with card. It may be a small up front cost, but it’s worth it. We recommend iZettle.
Social Media. Before the Christmas madness really begins, it may be worth making a rough ‘Social Media’ plan. If you’re swamped with shipping orders and making new items to sell, this will be the last thing on your mind. You can be super organised and use apps like Plannerly, Hootsuite and Buffer to schedule all your posts.
…and that’s it! We hope you found this checklist helpful. If we’ve forgotten anything, please let us know in the comments below. Hope you all have a really successful Christmas, we’ll probably see any of you London businesses at some markets, so please come and say hello!
To check out our shop, please go here.