Wreath Ops Unboxed: Rings, Boxes, and a Shipping Rate Education!

Our samples arrived and they look fantastic! The only problem is that I can’t wear one around my neck for a photo. My head simply wont fit. I’ll live, and my neck and head will thank me.

So let’s recap really quick: we’ve locked in a maker (he’s incredible), a brand, and our site is getting a fresh coat of festive green paint.

Now we need to think about the operations required to get these wonderful festive rings to your door!

We’re starting from zero, and this makes a few very important things difficult:

• How many wreaths can we sell?

• Which lets us know how many boxes to buy

• And that helps us negotiate a shipping rate

We’re starting off on the right foot. But I’m still filled with joy because our wreaths have arrived, and it’s starting to get quite festive here.

Wreaths Need Rings

This is a new partnership with our farm, and we want to be great partners. A casual conversation reveals that they can make around 2000 for us. The number in our head was more like 10k, but we need to find a way to meet in the middle.

This 2k is not a hard number either; they have the capacity for many more. But they don’t have the rings, the metal frame that holds everything together.

When do they order theirs? February. Nice.

Scramble time.

A few calls later, we’ve uncovered 6000 more! The seasons are not over yet!

Order placed.

Boxes

A 26” wreath needs a 26”x26”x 5” (or 6”) box. This is not a standard size and needs to be custom ordered. This is also not a cheap box.

A wreath is made of a few things: beautiful boughs, cedar, huckleberry, fir, and a lot of air. It requires a rigid box to support it through the shipping ecosystem during a busy holiday season.

Can I get a 26” flat rate box? No.

If we were targeting around 10k boxes, we’d need to source them now. I don’t know cardboard, I don’t know boxes, and I certainly don’t know how much space 10,000 boxes take up on pallets.

Here’s the answer: one 1,200 sq ft house or about 90 pallets.

And our facility doesn’t have room for all of them.

They could live outside for a little bit… my SoCal brain likes to think. Quickly forgetting that trees like rain, and the PNW (where our farm is located) gets a ton of it!

Party tents? Storage units? All these roads exhausted due to space or logistical issues, we ended up cutting the order into pieces to accommodate our facility and giving up a healthy volume discount.

Upside? A much happier partner.

Seems like a good trade.

Shipping

I’m beginning to understand why this type of business has not flourished online in the past. 

We plan to change that in our quest to build a massive wreath brand, but we’re finding that shipping wreaths is extremely expensive. Easily our largest cost.

Most rates are calculated by package weight or DIM.

DIM Weight: (L x W x H) / DIM Factor

DIM stands for Dimensional Weight. If your package is over a standard size, it flips into DIM weight. The packages we send are under 10 lbs, but they weigh in on a DIM scale as 25 lbs! Insane.

There are a few roads to go down here. Simple platforms like Shippo or Shipstation offer volume discounts that help discount the price. They pool everyone's volume together to get better rates. 3PLs do this too. Plus, they have carrier options (UPS, FedEx, etc).

The downside is a lack of negotiation power.

DIM is your negotiating lever with the carriers.

Here’s what you need, and what we don’t have:

• Anticipated volume

• Last year's volume data

The more volume you have, the better leverage to get a higher DIM and the lower the per-item shipping price. Pretty ideal.

The other thing that’s not really in our favor: All of our volume is in 1-2 months, and so this ends up getting averaged out over the entire year. It’s complex, still learning.

So we need to estimate our volume and then next year renegotiate rates based on actual volume.

SAN v SEA Rep:

I met a UPS rep in San Diego who was quite helpful in bringing us up to speed on how this process worked. He was our guy because of proximity to our location, but because we were shipping out of Washington, we would be charged an out-of-zone fee of 1%.

I tried everything to waive this extra fee added to every box to no avail! I asked what he would do in my position, and he put me in touch with the local Washington rep and gave up our volume to a coworker. Cool move.

Little did we know, our new rep in the area had intimate knowledge of wreath businesses, had worked with others, and could help us work through rate options based on her experiences!

Oh, and she knew boxes!! What an interesting turn of events.

Ideally, we’d have pulled all of this together in July. But we don’t crawl, walk, or jog... We sprint! For better or worse.

As the season races toward us, we’re well on our way to securing ideal year 1 rates, buying an insane amount of boxes, and opening up for business.

I’ll let you know when the site is live! Any day now. 

Happy Holidays,

Jonah “the howl guy”

Follow along as we build this business in public and subscribe here if you’re feeling festive.

🎄Days until Christmas: 61
💰Sales: 24 (promised, but not purchased)

✅ a product
✅ a manufacturer
✅ name
✅ brand
✅ shipper

❌ customers
❌ no site