THE GIFT FACTORY FOR CHARITIES

Charities can gain from a Gift Factory in a number of ways.

Firstly, and most obviously, merchandising becomes a simpler, more profitable and more straight-forward process – you can produce very short runs (with every Gift Factory process producing one-offs is totally possible and the unit cost is hardly higher than a long run) which means no inventory costs holding loads of different designs, no having to predict weeks or even months in advance your likely sale for every item, no disappointed customers who’d really like this or that design on a set of coasters or a t-shirt. You can literally top up stocks of product on a daily – even hourly – basis, indeed for high value items you could even offer "print on demand” with the Gift Factory processes taking only a few minutes from order to finished product.

One of the great advantages of owning a Gift Factory is the benefit to your merchandising cash flow. Let’s just take a simple example – coasters (always a popular item particularly coming up to gifting seasons like Mothers’ Day and Christmas).

You have perhaps twelve potential coaster designs but traditionally you’ve had to commit weeks or months in advance to at least a hundred of each design – so for cash flow you’ve perhaps chosen to only offer six options – that’s still the finished cost of 600 coasters tied up for months. With The Gift Factory you can buy perhaps 240 blank coasters (less than £200) a week or so before the event and print 20 of each design (total print costs around £30 and around 4 hours of a volunteer/staff member’s time). Very quickly you know which designs to reprint and again with very little cost you can refresh your display, and your stock holding will be minimal.