How do Gifting Startups Manage Inventory and Orders During Valentine's?

🔍Insights

Preeti Karna

Mar 22, 2022 — 4 min read

Gift items inventory management

As the the month of February starts, the gifting items and valentine's day products create a surge in stocks. The management and processing of orders, inventories, and selling gift items during Valentines becomes an art. Increasing sales and earning more profit can be made easier by proper inventory management.

Lets get insights of some of the startups selling Valentine's Day products and how they manage inventory to increase their sales and boost their business growth.

Whitecub

When we started WhiteCub over eight years ago, it used to be only Valentine's Day at our place. Fast forward to a few years, it evolved into a full Valentine's Week, and now our brand typically celebrates the entire month of February as Valentine's month. That is why this year, we have specially curated Valentine's Gift Box of hazelnut cashew & chocolate spread, fresh strawberries; this is because of a specific reason. Our Target Customer base is health-conscious people who do not want to compromise on their health even during celebrations, so we have crafted a perfect match of our healthy yet equally yummy Hazelnut-Cashew & Chocolate Spread (which has no preservatives, added oil, and is sweetened with unrefined sugar) and Fresh Strawberries. We have intentionally not opted for the stuff overloaded with sugars or Harmful Chemicals because we firmly believe that our customers express love for each other and their loved ones. Their health should also remain our top priority.

Our second line of Valentine's Day focuses on gifts straight from our Ice Cream line. We have a full range of chocolate flavours (Sinful Chocolate, Belgian Chocolate, Chocolate Factory, Choco Heaven, Forest Bathing etc.) and, of course, our very popular Strawberry Crush ice cream. We have our dedicated customer base for our products all the year along. The main segment of our gifting options comes from our regular product lines, Valentine’s Day is no exception. In spite of our extremely hectic working hours during festivals including Valentine’s Day, oOur inventory gets managed very well, mainly because of three factors.

Our main proportion of our gifting segment comes from our already existing product lines.
We include 3rd party delivery options like WeFast, DTDC etc especially during this time period.
We also undertake customized order productions

The Baker's Dozen

We look at the sales of the last one month for all the products that we are looking to promote on Valentine’s and then project the demand based on that data, keeping a certain % of buffer of course. Managing orders is based on our standard operating procedures, and is a by-product of the forecasted demand. Therefore the crucial part of all of this is the ‘demand forecasting.

Zouk

Valentine's Day is a special moment for us. Every time a customer picks a Zouk product to gift to their partner, it means a lot. They chose us over so many options for this special moment. While our bags are chosen as gifts and we do see a spike in sales, this year we are focussing on Self Love too.

Oftentimes, we take so much effort and stress in finding the right gift for our partner that we forget to get something special for ourselves. So, at Zouk, we are nudging consumers to pick our cruelty-free, handcrafted product, just for themselves. So far, we are seeing good support and hope to continue saying this throughout the year.

The Nestery

We are not a gifting startup and we don't hold inventory. So it's not really been a problem but however, during high peak seasons, we do manage like a lot of these. For example, during Diwali, if we manage, we don't manage inventory, but we work with the brands that he's working with, and manage logistics extremely tightly, like basically speak to all our stakeholders including logistics partners and brands and sort of manager experience really tightly. We're very cognizant of when collections go up on the website, go away from the outset so that no customer is left disappointed that their order doesn't reach them on time. We give our all to make sure things reach everyone on time.