You are right Jill, it is much easier to get started with your holiday planning now. Figuring out the types of service and product promotions — and pre ordering all of the things you will need to keep up with both of these — is going to be invaluable to your holiday sanity.

We are already choosing the holiday retail products we will be carrying through the season and beginning to place our orders for them to stock up. We are also planning our holiday retail displays. We are fortunate enough to have a larger-than-average area we can use to create them. For instance last year we used round tables and wooden apple boxes painted green and dusted with glitter to show off our featured products and holiday gift packs. We then trimmed them with holiday lights and a few other accent items and a gorgeous retail display was born. We also painted small branches silver (these were just ordinary yard branches from fall cleanup) and used glass bead drops tied to them with fishing line to sparkle up the display shelves and give it a whimsical feel. It takes a little forethought to have a beautiful display but it is well worth it to start ahead. Then the preparation for it can be done in much more manageable chunks if you craft items, like we have.

We are beginning to purchase the extra products needed to perform the service promotion. It doesn't matter if it is a conditioning treatment, a seasonal scent of pedicure massage cream, or a refining mask treatment that we will use for the promotion. If we are going to advertise and tell our clients about it then we need to be certain that we have enough to give every client who chooses the promoted service. It is very disappointing for the client to wish to have that special service done only to find out that we are out of the products needed to perform it. This happened to me early in my career and once I realized I would not have enough product to perform the service for the clients who had already booked it and tried to order more, it was unavailable. I was able to substitute a different product but it was still a disappointment for some guests. Lesson learned, make sure there is enough to go around.

— Sandy