One hurdle for a retailer or website selling outdoor Christmas decorations is the great concentration of the sales. We ship about 75% of our annual sales from September through December. This means cash flow and staffing pressures at different times of the year and , quite frankly, a lot of golf from May to September. Not too bad, you say, but golf lacks the satisfaction of helping a customer choose a new Nativity set for their church or working on a custom Nutcracker for a bricks and mortar retailer.

One solution, for us, was the creation of our Spring/Summer/Fall lawn and  garden website, Saint Francis Garden. Since we have a strong Christian theme in our Christmas Night Inc. website, it was natural for us to choose a theme of Christian saints for our garden site. Choosing  Saint Francis of Assisi as our “patron” was also easy also. The story of Saint Francis is inspiring and resonates with our current concerns with preserving nature and the environment. He has been called “the patron saint of the birds and the bees” and there are many stories about his communication with wild animals.

Saint Francis is also known for creating “Live Nativity” recreations of the birth of Jesus using farm animals and village people to fill the roles of the original participants. Our first vision of this site was similar to an ancient churchyard or monastery garden complete with fountains, birdbaths urns and planters, but soon, the demands of our website visitors and customers pushed us more and more into religious statuary and that is nearly our entire focus today. At times we struggle to add to the figures of Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the more “popular” saints and we are open to suggestions from you as to what to add next. Please send ideas in your comments.

Although we have tried very hard to source more of our product in the USA, about 95% of our Nativities and Outdoor Christmas Decorations are made in various Asian and Pacific countries. We have been successful in developing US suppliers for our wood Nativity Stable and our  2D wood nativity figures. The vast majority of our Christmas figures and Nativity figures are shipped to us in that main- stay of the retail supply chain, the steel shipping container. These are steel boxes used for dry cargo and come in standard 20 foot, 40 foot 40 foot high cube(one foot higher) and 45 foot lengths.

These containers are filled with product at inland factories, trucked to container ports and loaded onto specially built container cargo ships in many countries around the world, sailed across the oceans and  unloaded in the destination container ports. US  manufacturers and exporters use them as do most foreign manufacturers and exporters. Over the past 10 years or so, a very predictable and efficient supply chain was developed for the import of retail items from Asian and Pacific manufacturers to fill the shelves of major US retailers, including WalMart.

As one of my earlier blogs indicated, the slowly abating major worldwide recession  we are experiencing has disrupted the flow and timely delivery of goods in the retail supply chain. For our operation, this means that Nativities and Christmas Figures we expected in stock in May-June will now arrive July -August and even August September. We have a backlog of inquiries, orders and advanced payments based upon the in-stock expectations of many of our repeat and  new customers. We can’t really start major sales and marketing campaigns until we are “in stock” with the majority of our Nativity sets and Outdoor Christmas decorations.

To further complicate matters, there is a shortage of containers and much of the available shipping capacity, which had been scaled back as a result of the recession, will be overloaded as everyone scrambles to meet the retail Christmas deadline. Naturally this will result in shipping cost surcharges, profit recovery allowances for the shipping companies and will add to our costs and could result in price increases or lost margin. There will be more on this in future blogs.

Most of us have experienced the dramatic economic changes of the past few years. The “boom” economy, which was really only great for a select few, turned into a bust for everyone, again, except for a select few. Now that we in the US are struggling through a feeble recovery, the previous arrangements and relationships are being turned upside down.

The US recovery is being led by our export industries and the huge volume of imports of consumer goods from China is a fraction of recent peak levels. That sound good, doesn’t it? Here we are making export sales and importing less which will improve our trade balance and create jobs. But wait! Now we are being told that this situation has created shortages and bottlenecks. What’s going on here?

The first warning was a labor shortage on Southern and Coastal China. Many of the workers from these factories had been laid off and many factories closed as they were insolvent. These workers and the workers still employed who went home for Chinese New Year, did not return to their previous areas as they found jobs inland, or in other factories or stayed in their home areas as China expands it’s manufacturing base. The result in the south is a labor shortage. The next upheaval is a demand for higher wages now being played out in Chinese  automobile factories like Honda’s.

The latest “upside down” story is a shortage of steel shipping containers, known simply as containers. These are the wonderful 20 ft, 40ft and 45 ft steel boxes that have revolutionized international shipping of all kinds of goods and commodities. When the US was importing billions of dollars of goods in  of these containers each year there was a regular route and flow of containers from the orient to retail warehouses and back to the shipping ports to be returned to China to be refilled. That volume is way down and US exporters, who are mostly not located in large cities, are demanding export containers to fill. Instead, the shipping companies are stockpiling the containers or taking them out of service, because it costs too much to return them empty and the price to make new ones has risen significantly. The result is a shortage and another bottleneck to our retail recovery. I am sure there are experts who will read this and say that I have oversimplified the situation, but the result is the same and they don’ t know when it will be corrected

In a previous post, I wrote about starting this blog as an SEO aid for our website Christmas Night Inc.. I have been writing the blog since April 17,2009. At first, I was straining to find things to write about, until I started to “write what I know”. The more I do this, the more interesting comments I received, to the point where I feel I owe some responders answers to their questions and requests.

I an now finding out how to add pictures, diagrams and. perhaps videos as several of you have requested. I agree, these will make for a better publication. With regard to the blog template, we used the basic WordPress template. As regards spam blocking, WordPress has a  built in spam blocking functionality which the tech people set at a high enough level to be effective.

Going forward, we want to become more sophisticated and try to make our blog look more like our website, as well as use more of the many tools that seem to be available for blogs. But for now, we will continue to write about the industry, our business and business in general as well as publishing stories from really skilled writers and storytellers like Brian “Fox” Ellis

Starting and maintaining this blog has been, and continues to be, an education. When I first started, my concern was having enough to write about on a regular schedule.I first used stories from the famous story teller, Brian “Fox” Ellis and these went over well. I then talked about new products and new sources, but finally, as the writing instructors advise, I started to write what I know and that is the details of running this business.

Twelve years ago, when we created our first website, we were pioneers. Now we are one of millions of retail websites, but, in many ways, we are still unique. One of our main marketing techniques has been and continues to be “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO. To me, much of this is a black art comparable to alchemy in the middle ages, which claimed to turn base metals into gold. We have a very good marketing organization, Mountain Media, hosting and marketing our sites. As a result of their efforts, we enjoy very high key word  page rankings with Google and other major search engines.

Mountain Media suggested that I start writing a blog to improve our website visibility and I did. This is when I discovered the problem and value of comments. Comments can be just that, a gratuitous entry either criticizing or applauding the particular blog post. Before we put in effective spam blocking software, we attracted hundreds of unrelated email comments touting some unrelated product or service, trying to piggy- back on our blog and website. Now the filtered comments that come through are mostly relevant and offer accolades, ask questions or just comment. Most come from other websites looking to improve their page rankings by commenting on our blog. Since this networking should also helps our page ranking, we mostly approve them. The only ones I have problems with are  the blatantly named sites ( you know who you are). These I do not approve.

I am still learning and I appreciate comments on how I can do this blog better, but don’t try to sell me something.