Dreaming of an early Christmas
October 20, 2003 | 12:00am
About four weeks into the "ber" months, the Christmas bells have faintly started to chime in the background. Pre-holiday sales have begun to settle in, and although they usually masquerade as Halloween bazaars, E-Male knows it’s merely a ploy to have first dibs on the clever pre-Christmas shoppers. For the crafty, gift wrappers are being horded by the truckloads, to monopolize the more tolerable designs before all that‘s left are merely second-rate reindeer and facially distorted elven patterns. It‘s just like Santa to start early, and after centuries of doing business, he must have learned by now that it pays to get a headstart.
In the midst of October, the average consumer is in the troughs of designing his kid‘s trick-or-treat costume. But for the business-minded, it‘s best to get your hands in the bag just as soon as the peanuts are out. And although E-Male doesn‘t draw up his Christmas list until two days before Jesus‘ birthday bash, smart entrepreneurs start drawing them up months before. Not for their family of course. But for their business.
The elaborate Christmas décor has yet to be put up along Ayala Avenue, but then again, E-Male knows that we don‘t want to get ahead of ourselves too much. But the holiday season, just as with any traditionally festive event, is the apotheosis of modern capitalism.
Just as how Halloween has its costumes, and Valentines its plastic blow-up hearts, Christmas is well-embedded in the mass production of trees (fake uprooted ones, unfortunately for the environmentalists), funny multicolored balls and figurines of fat, overweight, Western P.E. teachers in red overalls.
Unfortunately, with high potential comes high risk. Just because a good has "Christmas" written all over it – it isn‘t assured of high sales. With an abundance of specialty products, clearance still serves as a problem by the end of their product cycle. E-Male once invested an atrociously huge amount of money on mistletoe in "different shapes and sizes, colors and designs" hoping to ride the wave of new holiday collectibles. A wave which, quite obviously, did not exist. He still believes in the potential of a designer line of mistletoe – and although his lady friends found it to be oddly endearing to say the least – after his first season of business, had the burdening problem of getting rid of all the excess mistletoe. (In fairness, a total of three were sold. Sold to family members but sold nonetheless.) Storage surely wasn‘t an option, realizing that it would be cheaper to sell it straight off the bat than to wait an entire year for clearance.
Solution: Party giveaways.
Of course, there are more ingenious products to go for, especially for the holidays. The self-help industry might be something worth looking into: Gift Buying for Dummies: A Complete Guide for Male Shoppers or Dreaming of a White Christmas: Combating Loneliness in the Midst of Holidays. Not only is Christmas, ironically, one of the leading causes of middle-class seasonal depression, but it’s also the time when book purchases are on the high. Not only is it a safe bet when it comes to buying for that ambiguous Tito Don, but it’s an underhanded compliment to have people think they’re more intellectual than they really are.
For less derogatory gift ideas, sometimes it pays for a business to keep things safe; selling products that are in demand during and outside of the holiday season. Food stalls have known to work well with blending in with the Christmas spirit. Squid balls designed to look like Christmas ornaments, and siopao that looks like the better half of a snowman’s face. Chicharon fashioned after snowflakes and isaw dressed as candycanes might just add the holiday flavor needed to boost sales. E-Male has tried to shape fruitcakes to look exactly like fruit – but unfortunately, fruitcakes were never really a hot topic to begin with.
Then again, the major decisions on profiting from the holidays should still be made as early as now. For the most part, deciding on the exterior décor of either your restaurant, your shop or even your office is more than just jovial party favor, but it’ll keep the pesky girlfriend something to play around with her sketchbook before she decides to do a little pre-Christmas shopping of her own.
Halloween isn’t even close to breaking through, but Christmas is only a hop skip and a jump away once the jack-o-lanterns are turned in. A good way to start squeezing the juice out of your lemons is to have your employees run overtime as early as now. By cramming all the end-of-the-year paper work and loose ends by the holidays does not only kill company loyalty but it gives employees more reason to gripe about their already so small Christmas bonus. The best part is, you won’t be so easily associated with Uncle Scrooge anymore. (Maybe Freddy Krueger, if you start pushing the envelope late October.)
On the technical side, to make sure the office is still topsy-turvy during the holidays, keep your computer networks from bogging down by mandating a deadline for all holiday e-greetings to be sent before mid-November. Not only does it allow your staff to put some discipline into that often-procrastinated-tradition of greeting those far off relatives, but it keeps the network from turning into a regular holiday pipeline of half-meant salutations. One of the stranger reasons for inefficiency during the latter half of the year is due to the amount of cutesy-patootsy e-mails about the holidays. If E-Male had ten centavos for every time he printed a forwarded X’mas e-mail instead of his client’s background information, he’d never have a problem with toll money.
So in celebrating an early Christmas, business wise, it’s always good to push up the schedule. Hold the Kris Kringle a couple of months early to fast forward the unproductive revelry, and scrap the "who-has-the-most-Christmas-cubicle" contest to reduce office clutter. In the end, Christmas will surely be in the air when the profits start to roll in.
E-mail E-Male at argee@justice.com.
In the midst of October, the average consumer is in the troughs of designing his kid‘s trick-or-treat costume. But for the business-minded, it‘s best to get your hands in the bag just as soon as the peanuts are out. And although E-Male doesn‘t draw up his Christmas list until two days before Jesus‘ birthday bash, smart entrepreneurs start drawing them up months before. Not for their family of course. But for their business.
The elaborate Christmas décor has yet to be put up along Ayala Avenue, but then again, E-Male knows that we don‘t want to get ahead of ourselves too much. But the holiday season, just as with any traditionally festive event, is the apotheosis of modern capitalism.
Just as how Halloween has its costumes, and Valentines its plastic blow-up hearts, Christmas is well-embedded in the mass production of trees (fake uprooted ones, unfortunately for the environmentalists), funny multicolored balls and figurines of fat, overweight, Western P.E. teachers in red overalls.
Unfortunately, with high potential comes high risk. Just because a good has "Christmas" written all over it – it isn‘t assured of high sales. With an abundance of specialty products, clearance still serves as a problem by the end of their product cycle. E-Male once invested an atrociously huge amount of money on mistletoe in "different shapes and sizes, colors and designs" hoping to ride the wave of new holiday collectibles. A wave which, quite obviously, did not exist. He still believes in the potential of a designer line of mistletoe – and although his lady friends found it to be oddly endearing to say the least – after his first season of business, had the burdening problem of getting rid of all the excess mistletoe. (In fairness, a total of three were sold. Sold to family members but sold nonetheless.) Storage surely wasn‘t an option, realizing that it would be cheaper to sell it straight off the bat than to wait an entire year for clearance.
Solution: Party giveaways.
Of course, there are more ingenious products to go for, especially for the holidays. The self-help industry might be something worth looking into: Gift Buying for Dummies: A Complete Guide for Male Shoppers or Dreaming of a White Christmas: Combating Loneliness in the Midst of Holidays. Not only is Christmas, ironically, one of the leading causes of middle-class seasonal depression, but it’s also the time when book purchases are on the high. Not only is it a safe bet when it comes to buying for that ambiguous Tito Don, but it’s an underhanded compliment to have people think they’re more intellectual than they really are.
For less derogatory gift ideas, sometimes it pays for a business to keep things safe; selling products that are in demand during and outside of the holiday season. Food stalls have known to work well with blending in with the Christmas spirit. Squid balls designed to look like Christmas ornaments, and siopao that looks like the better half of a snowman’s face. Chicharon fashioned after snowflakes and isaw dressed as candycanes might just add the holiday flavor needed to boost sales. E-Male has tried to shape fruitcakes to look exactly like fruit – but unfortunately, fruitcakes were never really a hot topic to begin with.
Then again, the major decisions on profiting from the holidays should still be made as early as now. For the most part, deciding on the exterior décor of either your restaurant, your shop or even your office is more than just jovial party favor, but it’ll keep the pesky girlfriend something to play around with her sketchbook before she decides to do a little pre-Christmas shopping of her own.
Halloween isn’t even close to breaking through, but Christmas is only a hop skip and a jump away once the jack-o-lanterns are turned in. A good way to start squeezing the juice out of your lemons is to have your employees run overtime as early as now. By cramming all the end-of-the-year paper work and loose ends by the holidays does not only kill company loyalty but it gives employees more reason to gripe about their already so small Christmas bonus. The best part is, you won’t be so easily associated with Uncle Scrooge anymore. (Maybe Freddy Krueger, if you start pushing the envelope late October.)
On the technical side, to make sure the office is still topsy-turvy during the holidays, keep your computer networks from bogging down by mandating a deadline for all holiday e-greetings to be sent before mid-November. Not only does it allow your staff to put some discipline into that often-procrastinated-tradition of greeting those far off relatives, but it keeps the network from turning into a regular holiday pipeline of half-meant salutations. One of the stranger reasons for inefficiency during the latter half of the year is due to the amount of cutesy-patootsy e-mails about the holidays. If E-Male had ten centavos for every time he printed a forwarded X’mas e-mail instead of his client’s background information, he’d never have a problem with toll money.
So in celebrating an early Christmas, business wise, it’s always good to push up the schedule. Hold the Kris Kringle a couple of months early to fast forward the unproductive revelry, and scrap the "who-has-the-most-Christmas-cubicle" contest to reduce office clutter. In the end, Christmas will surely be in the air when the profits start to roll in.
E-mail E-Male at argee@justice.com.
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