I love finding cool new products for Give Simple. Truly new and innovative ideas are few and far between, though! I can’t tell you how disappointing it is to go to market and see so many manufacturers that seem to think a new color of their best item is enough to get customers excited. No, what I am looking for is the NEXT best item!

That is what gets me excited, gets the magazine editors excited, and makes our sales happen! About this time last year, a product came to us that I thought had potential. A few weeks later, I was sending it off to Real Simple magazine for their Mother’s Day Gift recommendations. That started the madness that was the Make Your Own Cookbook Kit .

For the first two months, everything went great. We sold hundreds and hundreds and had a great idea for an add-on item to go back and sell to the customers who bought the original item. I was amazed at the life of the product beyond Mother’s Day. Customers continued to buy as a result of the magazine placement all through May. Then one day when I went to reorder, I found out that the next production run had not been scheduled – Give Simple’s hot item was about to sell out! What!?! No more Make Your Own Cookbook Kit ?

Now it’s six months later, and the madness is about to start again, late enough in the season to be totally infuriating, but not so late that we won’t be killing ourselves to try to capture every last sale. This is exactly the sort of thing that can give us fits if the postal service or UPS screws up an order for one of our customers. They can’t run out and replace it, all they can do is torture us as if we personally failed to put it in their hands!

The good news is that the Give Simple customers will have an original gift choice, once again, not the same old thing you get at the mall. More good news, finally we also have Make Your Own Cookbook Copies. This little item doe not include the software, so it is a lot less expensive to make duplicates for your friends and family.

While I call it madness, I have to admit, I love having my conference room loaded with boxes to ship off hundreds of orders to customers. So let the madness begin!