Is Your Gift Basket Business “Sustainable”?
In Specialty News, May, 2007, Ari Weinzweig wrote a thought provoking article entitled “Building a Sustainable Business”. With the growing popularity of organic foods and increased awareness of environmental issues, the idea of sustainability has often been associated with agriculture. But Weinzweig suggests that a business, if viewed as a growing, changing, organic entity, can also be “sustainable” through attention to “the practices and values that maintain the lives and livelihoods of the people, producers and community in which the business is located”. Full Story.
I was especially intriqued by one point in particular. According to the author, sustainability is “about staying in business”. He points out that this in part, “includes charging a fair price” for the goods and services provided.
In our wholesale gourmet food business, Apex Gift Foods, we have contacts with very large retail gift basket businesses ranging to very small, home based gift basket businesses. Too often, we see customers at both end of this continuum go out of business because they haven’t paid enough attention to pricing their products at levels that will cover and exceed their costs of doing business. In many cases, these now defunct businesses were so busy trying to compete on price with mass merchandisers, that they were neglecting to consider that they were in business to make a profit!
As Weinzweig says, “we must have the courage to charge what we need to charge to stay in business in a healthy way. Yet we still need to back up what we charge by delivering great experiences to those we interact with”.
Read the full article. You’ll learn a lot!
2 comments May 16th, 2007
