Writing about my brief love affair with the Hermiston Watermelon (and actually that should be Watermelons) gave me pause to recall the time when I ran a romantic gift company. How? You shall soon see.
Now, as most of you know, I am actually a hopeless romantic who tears up every time Notting Hill is on and Julia Roberts says to Hugh Grant, “I’m just a girl, standing before a boy, asking him to love her.” Given my track record in the area of breaking hearts and having mine broken, you have to wonder sometimes why I still love love. I know I do.
The whole gift store thing really happened quite by accident. At one point we were the web design team for Paula Begoun. If you don’t know the name, think of her as the Ralph Nader of the cosmetics world. She carved a niche as the Cosmetics Cop, testing products and writing reviews about it. Eventually she expanded into offering her own line of products and it was our job to create an online ordering machine.
Paula also had her hand in some other pots at the time. If you remember the “Best Places to Kiss in the in the Northwest,” Paula had that, too. I can’t remember if she also owned the book rights, but suffice it to say she was very heavily engaged in promoting this concept.
This inevitably led to a new endeavor, Sealed With A Kiss. This was a company that offered really lovely romantic gifts, from scented candles and soaps to silky robes and equally silky roses. Very nice stuff.
The company could be found on the web at swakonline.com. It also had a full color mail order catalogue that was sent to people’s homes. They could order online or call orders in. It was set up as a potentially huge operation, akin to Pyramid Collection or Newport News.
Unfortunately, it was difficult for Paula’s company to serve two very different masters. The cosmetics side of the business was just beginning to take off and the romantic gifts side became a distraction.
My then ex-whatever and I really thought it had promise. We loved the gifts and the idea of a store where a man or woman could really find the perfect gift for someone they loved. It had a perfect mix of products, all top quality. There was nothing chintzy or cheap about the gifts or the site itself. It really had a market all to itself.
I can’t say exactly how it happened, but before we knew it we were backing a moving van up to our garage and offloading all the merchandise into it. We had proposed that we take the company over for a year to see if we could make it work financially.
I’m not sure what we were really thinking. We ran a creative services company and knew virtually nothing about merchandising, fulfillment or wholesale/retail purchasing.
Needless to say we learned our lessons on the fly. The catalog was still out and calls started coming in almost immediately. To fill orders, we would have to root through the still packed boxes, which weren’t packed with any particular strategy in mind.
Initially, it was just a couple of packages a week, which my ex-whatever or I dutifully packed, packaged and shipped using what was once the workbench in the garage. We had leased a postage scale, brought in tons of ghost turds (packing peanuts), and every morning we would pack up the orders from the day before.
In assessing the company, we thought one of the biggest problems was that the product line was now a year old. What were exclusives to SWAK eventually became commonplace with other retailers. We were losing our edge and needed to freshen things up.
To bring in some new merchandise we attended our first gift show. We were a very small retailer, so convincing some of the gift companies to ship us two dozen of something when they were used to shipping a thousand was a bit of a chore. But we eventually started to add new items to the mix, ones we thought would sell well.
Some of them did, some didn’t. I wasn’t a great buyer, as I would pick manly-man things using my tastes, which, as we know, can be quite eclectic.
And then all hell broke loose. We got a call on Feb. 7 from a friend of ours who worked over at the then Bremerton Sun. She had in her hands the Sunday Parade supplement that was set to go out the next day with all the newspapers.
Sealed With a Kiss was featured in it as a place to shop for Valentine’s Day. If we hadn’t had gotten that call, we would have never been prepared for the onslaught of orders. We worried that there would be thousands of calls in the last minute holiday rush.
There weren’t. Calls doubled I would say, but never reached biblical proportions. We had really counted on sales to be better, given the free publicity. Unfortunately, they weren’t. We were hampered by an existing inventory of products that were now old hat and saddled with a new inventory that we had financed out of CommuniCreations’ coffers.
It turned out to be the one-two punch of doom. Eventually we decided that like Paula, Sealed With a Kiss couldn’t fit into our business model. So we packed it all up one day and sent if off to Paula again, to be written off as a great idea that just never seemed to find enough love, either by its owners and overseers or the general public.
I did, however, learn a lot of valuable lessons about running a retail operation, which clients benefitted from. It really gets their attention when I say that I’ve been in their shoes and I really have walked their walk.
And I still have one momento of those days with Sealed With a Kiss – a lovely antique clock that never seems to stand up on its own two feet – just like the company it came from.
In the Emerald City, head in the clouds, romance in the air, and not a gift in sight.
– Robb