Mr Anniversary Gift

One of my favorites is our JustSteelRoses for a "traditional" wedding anniversary gift, something made from steel. We create our JustSteelRoses with steel wool, bought from Home Depot! Here's a recent testimonial from a customer:

"I gave my husband a card to build up to the fact that this was our "steel" Anniversary. I made reference to the fact that I was going to get him some steel to weld together, but instead I opted for something less dangerous (which is sort of an inside joke, because he tried to do some welding as a hobby and ended up in the E.R. with some bad burns...something about not putting your bare hand on a hot piece of metal...). When he opened the box, the look on his face was just priceless!! He said that those were the coolest things he had ever seen. He has the steel wool arrangement proudly displayed on his desk. Thanks for helping to make the day special!Stephanie"

The themes for traditional wedding anniversary gifts are paper, cotton, leather, fruit, wood, candy, wool, bronze, pottery, aluminum, steel, silk, lace, ivory and crystal for year 1 thru 15 and then silver for the 25th and gold for the 50th. We enjoy creating our products with the material for each year and we're constantly looking at how to improve our selection - suggestions from our customers are always welcomed.

I write here both about the market for traditional wedding anniversary gifts and about the business of JustPaperRoses, Inc. from an entrepreneurial perspective. One real nice feature about the market for anniversary gifts is that the demand is year round - people get married every week of the year, with an annual cycle of higher months April thru October, and lower months November thru March.

Most businesses do 50% to 80% of their business for Christmas. Many businesses experience huge spikes of volume for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day (floral businesses). Operating a business that has huge surges of volume over a short period of time is difficult at best. I'll never turn away our own Valentine's Day and Mother' s Day spike of orders, but what it means for us (me and 4 employees) is that we work about 12 hours per day in the week before these 2 occasions.

Well, now it's back to business as usual...

So we're not just gifts for traditional wedding anniversaries! Twice per year we get a spike of orders - first on Valentine's Day and then on Mother's Day. We even get "she cried" testimonials back on bouquest of JustPhotoRoses for Mom printed with pics of her kids, grandkids and great-grandkids on them.

So it's not an anniversary. We create for birthdays and just plain love and romance too. Every now and then we get a nice corporate order usually requiring some creativity, such as taking 1000 Budweiser bottle labels and making 500 JustPaperRoses from them.

But our core will always be the niche market for themed Wedding Anniversary Gifts. We now have repeat customers who have bought for each of 5 years from us, making it a tradition of coming back year after year and happy that we're still here!

Gotta go - 7 days until Mother's Day...