Has anyone used a company to host one of these sales? If so, what company and what was your experience?

We want to include this type sale as part of our holiday family night next month. We have zero expereince and are wanting to go with a company rather then doing it all on our own. I've found a few online, but would love a recomendation.

Thanks!

Itsalright!!!

Thanks- I'll be looking into this stuff- such a cool idea

Originally posted by Shawn:
Do you buy items in bulk from wholesaler? In state out of state?

Just Chrsitmas stuff? or a variety of holiday stuff?

I'd be interested in some more details about this

We buy from online wholesalers, mostly. There are 2 we use in Florida, one being accessories Palace. Dollar Days does a lot of drop-shipping.

I think we have used all of the ones listed in the previous post. Buck Wholesale had some great stuff this year.

We used to have a Dollar Store give us discounted bulk items on consignment, but none have been willing this year or last.

We go with the idea that a student should be able to get a variety of gift items for family members for $10 or less. We have ornaments and other holiday things, but mostly gift items.

If things go right, we'll have some preview displays on-line and I'll put a link here. Still don't have those flyers on-line. Sorry.

This is the second year we have funded our own shop. The websites we used are www.dollardays.com ( if you catch it just right, you get free shipping over certain dollar amounts and their things are pretty good quality and fast shipping!), www.overstock.com (by the way shop thru Box Tops Marketplace and receive a percentage back to your school if you are signed up for BTs), www.abcdistributing.com (sometimes slow to ship things, I won't order anything more from them this year for our shop for I fear it won't be here in time), www.sav-on-closeouts.com, and www.giftguys.com. If you have a Garden Ridge store, they mark things down often and you can get some really good deals.
As far as envelopes go, we just buy regular #10 size and run them through the printer with the child name, grade and who to shop for. We attach those to a flyer with a schedule of which day their child will shop and send it home the Monday of the sale week. We only sell 2 days, Thursday and Friday but we do a preview on Wednesday for parents to come check out our things and we stay open until 6:45pm on Thursday night, we have a PTA meeting that night, and then on Friday we will stay open until about 6pm to allow the stragglers to come in.
Also, and this is the major undertaking of the shop, we pre-wrap everything but a sample of the items and then place everything out by price on the tables and number them to correspond to the shopping sheet we use with the kids. A volunteer takes the child around the tables to pick their things, marks the shopping sheet with the items wanted, hands it to a pick person who then puts the order together while the volunteer and child go make the tags for the items, the child tags and pays for their items and they are out the door. It goes very quickly and easy. I know you want to know "How do you know what everything is if it is wrapped?" We mark the boxes or bags, set everything up by number if possible and only have about 4 people pulling the things for the 2 days. You get to know where everything is quickly. It really does save a lot of time. We also offer to hold the kids items for pickup because we got some great deals on some preety big items, like wreaths and baskets. We have bus riders and it wouldn't be safe to send them home on the bus and our parents love this option. We send home a bright card stating that their child has items to pick up.
Our prices are 50 cents to $6 and we sell just about everything!
As far as what to buy, we have:
Christmas items - wreaths, ornaments, stockings, colorbooks, wall hangings, story books, candles decorations,etc
General items - picture frames of different sorts and sizes, play trucks, jewelry, lipgloss, stationary sets, BBQ sets, address books, gloves and stocking hats, candles, potholders, giant flashlights, lunch cooler bags, magnets, photo albums, windchimes, fleece blankets, spa sets, tool sets, tackle boxes and so on.
We also have some college items and NFL items, just local teams (UNC Tarheels, Wolfpack and Duke and the Carolina Panthers). We bought tumblers in sets and broke them up into individuals, license plates and frames, pennants, ornaments ets. We did not go overboard on these items as they are a little more expensive to buy and we didn't want to get stuck with things that don't sell. If we do well with them then we will look at purchasing large quantities next year.

If you want pictures of some of the items we have or have any questions, just email me (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) and I'll be glad to share them with you.

[ 11-04-2006, 03:13 PM: Message edited by: kchesneyfan ]

Do you buy items in bulk from wholesaler? In state out of state?

Just Chrsitmas stuff? or a variety of holiday stuff?

I'd be interested in some more details about this

We have about 900 students.

Last year, we purchased 8,000 items and had to do a lot of shopping because we were running out of things. We sold almost 11 thousand units, and there were some disappointed kids.

We have ordered 10,000, but the average price is slightly higher -- most items are 2-4 dollars instead of 1-3, up to 10 dollars.