All over the world, it sometimes seems like festivals peak only during winter. Every retailer big and small always has an eye on end of the year sales, no matter what the rest of the year has been like. If you’re a proactive retailer, you’d do well to start stocking up and advertising your products from as early as August and September to cash in on the festive sales.
Starting in September and the first week of October, Halloween costumes for adults and kids, accessories and decorations are hot picks with consumers. As a retailer, your challenge at this point is to ensure that all Halloween related purchases reach the customers well before the big day.
Following this, Christmas and New Year’s Eve are just around the corner, and here’s where the real challenge of what people will buy begins.
Our Top Buying Predictions For This Winter
- Television Sets: Perhaps it is the comfort of being indoors and also the boredom that prompts people to buy more television sets in winter. Whatever their reasons are, the trend has remained a trend for the past five years.
- Kitchen Appliances: There’s nothing like a warm kitchen full of baked goodies just in time for the visiting grandkids. Even better, isn’t it, if one can do up the kitchen with a variety of gadgets ranging from electric chimneys to hob-tops? Sales for kitchen appliances big and small usually peak in winter.
- Baby Products: Baby products always sell well, no matter what time of the year it is. During winter, perhaps since a baby (and its parents) wouldn’t appreciate gifts other than strollers, car seats and other items they can actually use, the conscious shopper inadvertently buys these things for a baby in the family.
- Toys For Kids: An ever flourishing industry this one- because so many kids ask for the hugest of presents to go under the Christmas tree. From the more sophisticated gaming consoles to outdoor products such as bicycles, barbies and skateboards, expect to see a lot of kids’ toys fly off the shelves this winter.
- Video Recording Devices: Who doesn’t want to have a nice new video camera to make home videos with. If you’ve seen the number of Christmas videos that make it to America’s Funniest Home Videos, you can make a fair estimate of just how many video shooting devices get sold around Christmas. Five years ago, this may have meant a camcorder but in 2016, this means a smartphone that can shoot in all sorts of weather conditions.
- Small Consumer Electronics: iPads, e-book readers and headphones are sure shot buys in winter. When in doubt about gifting preferences, buy one of these. For one, they never go out of fashion. Also, with headphones, the advantage is that they’re available in a variety of price points. As a retailer of consumer electronics, you would do well to stock some for each price range.
- Winter Sports Gear and Clothing: With holidays come vacations, and with vacations come winter sports. You don’t need us to tell you that skiing is a hot favorite with consumers at this point. Other winter sports such as ice hockey, snow drifting or even just whiling an afternoon away on the bobsled are pastimes families indulge in.Sports gear for all of these sports will sell, no two ways about it.
When we speak of winter clothing, who doesn’t want to buy a new jumper, cardigan or pullover in winter? The more the number of color and design options you have of winter clothes, the wider the demographic they’ll appeal to.
- Items of Personal Use: This includes everything from hot water bottles to specialty teas, warm slippers, heated blankets and earmuffs. There’s no doubt about the fact that each of these products caters to a different demographic- grandma may quite enjoy the blanket and the ht water bottle, while Cindy prefers the warm indoor slippers. If you are a retailer whose USP is variety of products, you may do well to think about more products in this category and people they’d appeal to. While special teas may not be for everyone, people stepping out in winters do need earmuffs. What you can do is stock up a healthy mix of products and see what moves faster.
- Hot Chocolate: Just mentioning this one here gives us a fuzzy feeling! After all, isn’t winter all about snuggling up and having a big hot mug of this goodness by your side? How, as a retailer, can you leverage this sheer madness for hot chocolate in winters? These days, it is possible to convert everything into a packaged product. ‘Hot chocolate on sticks’, big blocks of flavored chocolate that can be dipped into milk are all the rage now, as are ideas that involve ‘dry’ hot chocolate- a package of cocoa, marshmallows and other fluff in a bag that you can throw into milk and have no regrets. You can get in touch with your local vendors to see who is making them.If you want to know what we’re talking about, take a look here.
Any other products that you look forward to selling this winter? Let us know in the comments!
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