Christmas shopping in January? That’s the reality for one Santa Rosa store owner

The holiday retail season can make or break retail businesses, especially as last year the season accounted for nearly 20 percent of overall industry sales. For some businesses it can be as much as 30 percent, according to the National Retail Federation.

For the Classic Duck gift store in Montgomery Village, a whopping 45 percent of its business comes in the two holiday months, owner Lynette Boisvert said.

The store is a prime example of the lengths to which small retailers must go to ensure a solid holiday shopping season and ensure they’ll be around for the next one. It’s a difficult path in a sector beset by challenges, most notably the announcement that Macy’s will close ?100 stores next year.

“The last week before Christmas, every day is like a whole (sales) week for us,” Boisvert said of her 35-year-old gift store, which primarily caters to baby boomer women with merchandise like jewelry, accessories and home and garden items.

Each year, she starts planning for the following year at the Atlanta International Gift & Home Furnishings Market that starts on Jan. 10. Yes, about two weeks after Christmas.

She goes early to take advantage of discounts provided by vendors, who can then begin planning well ahead for how much merchandise they’ll need to produce.

“Generally, there are some really good deals there,” Boisvert said. “They (vendors) have to have their numbers in by the end of March.”

But she doesn’t stop there. She’ll head to Las Vegas and go back to Atlanta again to try to wrap up all of her holiday shopping by the end of March.

The miles on the road are critical. About 80 percent of the holidays items are new. She can usually count on old reliables such as gingerbread houses and any item with a snowman on it - figurines, calendars, linens - though all with a new twist.

For example, a big hit this year is a ?$50 lantern-shaped snow globe that was so popular she was sold out by Dec. 1. Next year, there will be more, she promises.

Boisvert, 67, knows her customers well from years of experience dealing with consumer trends. She can go on at length about the Beanie Babies phenomenon in the early 1990s, or how in the 1980s she operated pop-up shops across the region to take advantage of the holiday spending sprees.

But she can still be surprised how certain products can take hold with the public. For instance, she was somewhat dubious about one recent item: a string of battery-powered lights tucked into jars or wine bottles.

“We have always sold strings of lights,” she said. “The jar thing I was surprised by.”

But they have proven very popular, and she knows that she will be buying more next year.

Other hunches can be more miss than hit. Once, she was excited about a bird figurine covered in a seed-like product.

“I thought they were so cute. My staff as soon as they saw it were, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’” Boisvert said. The staff was right, it didn’t sell, and they were not back on the shelf the following year.

One cardinal rule is not to get too trendy with holiday items, especially with colors. Gone are the days of the peacock-feathered Christmas tree.

“It’s pretty traditional when it comes to Christmas,” she said of her customers’ taste. “We like the good old-fashioned red and green and gold.”

Finding unique items is key, but so is proper display, so customers can imagine the items in their homes. For instance, she doesn’t place her coffee mugs and vases along a row on the shelf, but instead positions them throughout the store in open displays. They are at different height levels so customers can easily pick them up or view how they would look on a dining room table.

In fact, that’s the one advantage Classic Duck has over online providers, even Amazon. Customers want the experience of shopping in a tactile, brick-and-mortar place, especially for items such as jewelry and accessories like handbags and sunglasses. Those items ?account for about ?60 percent of the store’s business.

“You want to get your hands on it and try it on,” Boisvert said of the products.

It also helps that it has found a niche at Montgomery Village, where it moved in 2009. The outdoor shopping plaza in east Santa Rosa has become one of the more stable retail areas in the region, especially as many affluent customers live nearby, said Ben Stone, executive director of the Sonoma County Economic Development Board.

“It’s been a happy hunting ground for people who have survived,” Stone said of the local boutique retailers at the village.

The Classic Duck is open every day, so it must stock for the Christmas season during the month of October. In contrast, many stores will shut down for a day or two to completely overhaul the space with new items.

“We have to do it while we are working,” Boisvert said.

The store also ramps up hiring during the holidays, bringing in eight temporary workers to compliment its 12 regular employees, she said. Training can take weeks given all the different items for sale, especially learning all the different lines of the popular Pandora jewelry brand that has become a top seller.

Finding qualified workers has been a challenge this year with a tight labor market, Boisvert said, especially because retail generally doesn’t pay as well as other sectors.

But many of her workers are also fans of the Classic Duck, so they use the employee discount to help supplement their pay.

“We actually do have people who don’t take home any money, they just use it (their pay) to buy gifts,” she said.

So far, business is up more than 15 percent from last year’s holiday season. But she won’t be able to enjoy the good feelings for long because she starts discounting items on ?Dec. 26, when another group of shoppers flocks to the store looking for bargains. The annual trip to Atlanta will then be around the corner.

“Our customers want new things,” she said. “We are not a tourist shop where you can sell the same thing over and over.”