So far, this has been an unusual and frustrating year for Christmas Night Inc. Normally we expect to start receiving our Christmas Nativity sets and other large Christmas decorating figures in May and to have completed most of these incoming shipments by the end of August. This year, the Chinese labor shortages and labor strife, shortages of shipping containers, missing ships and poor weather have delayed much of our incoming product by several months.

The exciting thing is that we have now taken delivery of a large number of containers, most of which arrived last week and are arriving this week. While this puts quite a strain on our receiving and warehouse staff, we can now start to fill pending orders, follow up the many inquiries and contact loyal customers who want to complete sets or add new pieces to their collections. It also means that we can start to advertise online and with newsletters to our loyal customer base as well as pump up our SEO efforts.

We have also created a Christmas Night page on FaceBook and added a FaceBook Share icon on the website pages and this blog. We hope that customers will use these tools to show their friends sets and items that they liked and perhaps purchased,as well as sharing their Christmas stories and pictures. Please contact us and let us know what else we can do to make the website and blog as user friendly as possible.

I have written recently about the problems of having product made and shipped from factories in China, The Philippines and India. These problems include labor strife and labor shortages, lack of shipping containers and slow and increasingly costly ocean shipping. We can now add to this list, severe weather and disasters caused by inadequate facilities and developing country infrastructure.

What do I mean by these terms? Well we have recently had several shipments delayed by typhoons, which is what they call hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean. It appears that their typhoon season is earlier than our hurricane season in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Thus our factories in the Philippines have recently shut down to ride out the storms and clean up after. Fortunately, they seem to handle this well.

Another of our factories, in the middle of a major city, has just burned to the ground. We surmise that a combination of old, unsprinklered buildings which resembled a rabbit warren, working with combustible materials and indifferent municipal fire fighting services, usually reserved for those who pay, resulted in the complete loss of the production facility.

Fortunately, the factory owners are an organized and resilient group and have promised to rebuild for next season. The good thing for us is that our shipment from them is on the water and will be delivered to our warehouse next week. International supply chains may be less expensive than producing in the US (although that may change for some products), but they introduce many other costs and risks

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