Christmas comes but once a year, but for seasonal businesses it has to bring in more than just good cheer.
Theo Lambton set up Fir four years ago. The online Christmas tree website allows you to book and pay for a freshly cut tree of a particular size and have a variety turn up at your door for selection.
Initially he delivered nationwide through couriers but that proved such a logistical headache that he now focuses on Dublin and its surrounding counties.
Having pruned the business, it flourished. This year has seen the opening of a second Fir hub, in Belfast, while a third, in the UK city of Bristol, is set to open next year. Further hubs are planned.
Getting it off the ground was hard. Lambton had started out selling a few trees at the side of the road. “I bought them in nets and, because I couldn’t afford a machine to re-net them, I had to sell them still in their nets, which is not an easy thing to do,” Lambton says.
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Having cut his teeth in sales and secured investment, he came back the following year on a bigger scale, only to have hundreds of his trees stolen.
“It’s been emotional,” he says of his entrepreneurial journey to date.
Lambton studied business in London and worked there for a number of years before coming home to the midlands to focus on seasonal businesses. In summer he provides services to boutique festivals. “I decided I’d sooner make €1,000 for myself than make €10,000 by working for someone else,” he says.
“I like my freedom and being the boss of my own life.”
Fir plants two trees for each one it sells, one of them in Africa. It also sells handmade Christmas wreaths and provides a tree collection service. This Christmas he will employ more than 30 other seasonal workers, many of whom come from the events sector.
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This is the first year the business will deliver a profit. “It’s also the first year I’ve been able to put up my own tree, that I wasn’t too stressed to do it,” he says.
Joy Redmond set up her greeting card business, trustword.ie, as a “side hustle” to her work as a marketing consultant. Christmas is its busiest season. Her bestselling card says: “Ho Feckin’ Ho.”
“I just can’t keep that one in stock,” Redmond says.
It’s the fourth Christmas for her business, too. She reckons some of its success is down to a shift in consumer sentiment. “There’s a real shop-local buzz going on, an anti-global one,” she says. “It’s about spending your money buying piano lessons from the local teacher, not on billionaires faffing around doing useless stuff in space.”
During last year’s lockdowns, gym owner Graham Cooley developed Zoom Santa, a virtual visit for children. It was a success. This year has been more challenging. Whereas last year the business got a knockdown rate from the hotel it rented, this year hotels are back open and the rate went up by a factor of five, “which made it impossible”, Cooley says.
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However, as one door closed, another opened. “We rented offices upstairs at the Taylors Three Rock venue in Rathfarnham instead, and then its owner asked if we’d consider putting on a live Christmas show downstairs.”
The result is that, as well as Zoom Santa, Cooley now also hosts a live Christmas experience including a mini-panto, a visit to Santa and a present for each child. It has been selling out.
He learnt an awful lot last Christmas. “When we started Zoom Santa we booked slots for 15 minutes, which seemed right. But it turned out that 15 minutes is an awfully long time to try to keep a small child engaged,” he says.
This year’s virtual visits last about eight minutes, which works out better all round. “Also, last year we recruited Santas on the basis of whether or not people had experience being a Santa, because we just didn’t know how else to gauge it,” he says.
“Turns out there’s a huge difference between shaking a child’s hand in a department store and having an engaging conversation with them online. It was only by hiring one or two actors last year that we realised how amazing they were at doing that, so that’s what we went with entirely this year.”
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Although his gyms are back open, Cooley has no plans to stop his Christmas enterprise. “I don’t know if we’re actually making money, but it’s just so enjoyable,” he says.
Christmas might be all about tradition, but it’s subject to trends. When Fabio Molle set up his ecommerce business Funky Christmas Jumpers in 2008, festive knitwear was all the rage, helped by Ryan Tubridy. Molle’s sales grew until 2015, when they began to decline. “These things are trends, they don’t last for ever,” he says.
The Christmas business had become a distraction from his new venture, Functional Tennis. Molle has built up an international following as a tennis influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and an avid audience for his tennis podcasts, which feature top professionals from all aspects of the industry.
He also sells tennis aids, including a wooden training racquet and a training journal. Only about 2 per cent of his sales come from Ireland.
“Even though the Christmas business is seasonal, it still requires a lot of energy and time, and that takes me from the tennis business,” Molle says. These days the jumpers are more like the icing on his Christmas cake. “They still sell, it’s still money coming in, and that’s great.”
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For James Keogh of Rathwood, a furniture store and café in rural Carlow, Christmas events have always been a great way to attract families. He used the lockdowns of the past year to revamp the store’s popular Santa train, which runs across its property through a forest. The train still goes into the woods but now stops at a circus big top, where families can enjoy a Christmas show.
“The Santa train was an institution but every institution needs to move and evolve, and this brings it to a new level,” Keogh says. “It’s challenging financially because there are more outgoings, but we survey everyone who leaves and the feedback is unbelievable, and as a family business you have to take the long-term view.”
The investment appears to have paid off. “In the past we always had to have a marketing budget for our Christmas events,” he says.
“This year it sold out by word of mouth. It’s great because it means that instead of spending money on Google and Facebook advertising, that money is going to performers.”
