Through my suburban newsagency we are selling the December Diamonds range of gay Christmas ornaments. They are selling well, primarily online though.
While we have been selling Christmas ornaments in-store and online for some years, this is our first year selling gay Christmas ornaments. It was a risk as the December Diamonds range was not readily available in Australia.
While we were at the Atlanta gift fair in January this year, we selected a a sizeable range of gay Christmas ornaments products and broader LGBTQI Christmas ornaments to offer in the Australian marketplace.
We received the products in late August and started offering them for sale in-store from September. Customers have reacted wonderfully. While they are pitched as gay Christmas ornaments, there are plenty that serve dual purposes, such as this one:
In-store they are placed on a tree, so shoppers can see them as they would look at home or work.
What is interesting is how people are purchasing these gay Christmas ornaments. It is rare they buy one at a time. Most common is 3, with plenty of sales at 4 and 5. Three is $210.00. That’s a nice sale.
This is opening a whole new market for the business, helping to expand how we see Christmas and ornaments more specifically. That is also helping our other ornament sales too, which is good.
We have promoted the gay Christmas ornaments with a series of social media posts of images, and videos like this one:
Here is another video we used early on to announce the range.
My point here is that we have not spent any money on marketing. rather, we wanted to see if we could build, traffic naturally, without promotions or deals.
We have not done anything significantly unique in promoting the range. The key has been in product selection, nurturing the supplier relationship to show what can be done here in Australia with a unique niche Christmas ornament range.
Overall, ornament sales for us this year are up 45% on 2019. Most of that has been online. In mention this to demonstrate that the in-store pitch is incidental to the core focus of the business. The shop offers primarily the fulfilment infrastructure.
While a core of the revenue from ornaments has come from repeat shoppers, we are serving a healthy mix of new shoppers, which is terrific.
Our hope is that next year, we will see even more business for the gay Christmas ornament range, further expanding the reach of the online business.