Chatswood Lollypotz giftware franchise case study

Rosemary Harmata is the owner of a Lollypotz giftware franchise in Chatswood, NSW. She commenced operation of her home based franchise in August 2009.

Rosemary said that Christmas was “Crazy! Unbelievable!” and she really did not expect it would be that busy. Despite thinking she was well prepared for the Christmas rush, she didn’t anticipate the number of orders that came in.

Rosemary’s Christmas success was extraordinary, given she is operating her giftware franchise from home. She says that the reason for her Christmas success was casual leasing at the end of November in Macquarie Centre, North Ryde; somewhere she considered to be a prime location. Not only did Rosemary receive the general retail sales from this lease, she also collected two major corporate orders.

Rosemary is already thinking about Christmas 2010 and is planning a storeroom for the period. She will start preparing the bouquets and ordering stock in July, and is confident that she will more than double turnover from last Christmas.

Rosemary says that she has now accepted that a $20K commitment to casual leasing will see her through for the next twelve months while she continues to build her corporate base. She will then look to move to a retail location permanently. Rosemary suffers the same issues as all other franchises – finding the right retail location of the right size at the right price.

She is planning to have more casual leasing this Christmas; an early one again to capture the corporate business and one closer to Christmas. Rosemary said that the Macquarie Centre casual leasing that she did last year was very successful for corporate sales. This year she will change the location of the stall to be in an area where people buy their lunch while at work. She thinks this will be even more successful than last year’s location which was outside Target.

Rosemary says she has been finding it hard to break into the corporate market for ongoing giftware franchise opportunities, and knows that it is something she has to work harder on. She has had some success with her corporate marketing but “just needs to do more”. She hopes that her upcoming casual leasing for Mother’s Day will also assist with getting more corporate clients.

Rosemary is a massive advocate for casual leasing, and says that it just gets easier and easier over time. Rosemary says that that the first time she did it, she found it exhausting and painful but now that she knows what to expect, is more aware of the preparation that is needed and has better relationships with the centre management and security, she finds the process much easier and enjoyable.

Rosemary feels she has a successful giftware franchise, and when asked what her secret is she replied “casual leasing! Also, having beautiful products”. Rosemary says she pays a lot of attention to her product ensuring they are always of the highest quality. She maintains that a franchisee can’t get lazy on this and produce substandard products. Also, having lots of products on display is extremely important. This really gets the customers attention and ensures the “Wow” factor.

Also, she believes another major contributor to her success is her belief in the product. Her main advice to people interested in giftware franchises is to “get it out there and it will sell itself”.

With all her success at Christmas and this year, Rosemary said that she could not have done it without the help of her chocolate wrappers. “If it was not for them I would not have survived”. She had four people helping her out, with one in particular who was wrapping a box every 3-4 days.

This ensured that all the chocolates were prepared and she just had to assemble them. This year Rosemary says she will start wrapping Christmas chocolates earlier herself but will again rely on a number of people to be wrapping once Christmas draws near. She is also considering hiring another person just to assemble.

Having people helping out is critical and Rosemary knows that she could not do it herself. She remembers being caught out at Easter while casual leasing. On the first day (Wednesday) Rosemary had made up about 1/3 of her Easter stock thinking it would be a quiet sales day, but she went in and sold out of all of her Easter products. She went home that night and frantically made up about another 1/3 of the Easter stock, and again sold out of all of the Easter bouquets on the Thursday.

She says she learnt her lesson: You need to be prepared from day one and you need someone preparing and assembling away from the stand. The casual leasing has also given her so much more exposure, being a home based business. She knows that she would not have received the large corporate order at Christmas had it not been for her casual leasing and the exposure it gave her within her territory.

The more she sold, the more people talked about her and Lollypotz and she hopes that in the future people will come looking for her regular stands. Rosemary’s online orders continue to be the highest of all at home businesses across Lollypotz, and this can only be attributed to her exposing her giftware franchise on a regular basis.