Pricing Your Halloween Gift Baskets
The price trend is for individual Halloween gifts to be reasonably priced and on the lower end of the price scale. Larger family gifts and corporate office gifts can be more elaborate and offered at a higher (but still reasonable) price point. Containers used for students, hospital patients and travelers need to be lightweight and packable or disposable (recyclable). Containers for children should either be cute and whimsical or durable and useful so that they will be kept and re-used – like our cauldron container used for our Spell Bound Halloween gift baskets. Alternately, recyclable works well for children as well. Family and corporate gifts should be presented in decorative containers that will add beauty as well as function to the home or office once the treats are all gone. The practicality and usefulness of the container should be a tangible reminder of the sender long after the candy is forgotten.
Now comes the fun part – sourcing the candy and treats that will go into the designs! This is my favourite part of the planning stage. I love finding new and exciting candy, chocolates and snacks that will blend in with the classic favourites. Our Hallowed Treats Halloween gift is a great example of this. Caramel popcorn, chocolate and chips are reliable standards for Halloween but I like to add fun items like gummy tarantulas, eyeball gumballs that ooze “bloody” red syrup when chewed, candy mice and other great finds that can be seen in our Boo-tiful Bounty Halloween gift basket. I also try to keep the intended recipient’s age in mind as well so I like to add items such as cookies and plush toys for younger children (as seen in our Boo to You Gift for Halloween), while older but still young-at-heart recipients may enjoy beautifully packaged gourmet treats as our Happy Jack gift basket for Halloween contains or the occasional wind-up toy (I can easily picture an adult sending a small wind up monster toy across their desk at work to ease job related tension).
I finish up this stage of the planning process by ordering colourful shredded paper to add colour at the base of the designs as seen in our Spooktacular Halloween Basket, ribbon in beautiful fall colours and prints, enclosure cards and theme appropriate cello for wrapping the completed gifts. Once all of the individual basket components have been ordered I move on to marketing. Being an e-commerce retailer (or e-tailer) we don’t have large shop windows to decorate or the need for traditional newspaper type flyers. Our particular business model requires us to use other methods to get our customers attention. Price is an extremely important consideration because of this and should be managed like any other part of your business - with care and attention to detail.
