Upgrading our packaging and storage area September 2011

One of the most important factors that affects time consumption, quality of goods and services, work performance, and a slew of other aspects of a successful business is your storage and packaging area. As a small start up company we first used simple plastic shelving units to store the few hundred products we had. This was a basic starting point with the intent to continue to approve and upgrade the system to match and exceed our growth. The plastic shelves met our need for being cost effective at the time and allowed us to have a general area to locate our cache of goods but at the same time hampered our ability to stay organized and in control of the inventory. I can't even imagine how much time is lost and stressed gained from the low quality and layout of facilities.

The recession can be a blessing to small portions of the population that have the extra funds and an open eye for deals. Our first up grade for packaging and storage started as a stop at a going out of business clearance sale at a local movie rental store. most of the movies had been picked over with few appeasing titles remaining, I remember one movie left on the shelf for sale being a 2006 National Spelling Bee documentary. Just beyond these slim pickings though there was another product of interest, the grid wall and fixtures that the stores products sat on. After talking to the stores manager we negotiated a price somewhere around 200 dollars for near 600 sq ft. of grid wall, a few hundred shelves that attach to them and a few wheel carts. If bought new I'd estimate the cost to be over a grand. Our idea was to hold on to these fixtures and use them to set up for a store front or fair in the future if the opportunity presented itself to us and until the latest upgrade this grid wall was used as our inventory storage. The grid wall gave us better organization and cut down the time it took to locate our signs but unfortunately was somewhat bulky and limited on the number of signs it could hold.

We decided to increase our sign inventory from 150 signs to near 600 by mid September and to a goal of at least 1500 signs by new years 2012. With this increase we knew we would need to implement a better strategy to control the influx of product. The answer was Marks's brain child, a custom made shelving unit that would vertically stack our signs in 15-20 item groups with each row having 18 removable shelves. This expandable shelving system will be able to accommodate the 1500+ signs and will be the premises for our inventory storage as Gifts and Games grows from an at home business module into a larger scaled warehouse location.

We had been using various spots in Mark and Kari's house for our packaging and storage needs. The dining room table worked well as a sorting station as well as an incoming/outgoing spot, Mark and Kari's pool table in their basement started as the packaging area, and the home office space was used for printing shipping labels and working on eBay. Mark decided to consolidate all of these functions into one streamlined station utilizing a converted 8' x 12' coal room in the basement. The room was recently a loft room that had been supped up with a nice coat of paint and a new set of lighting fixtures.

The first set of runners

Humble Beginnings

Welcome to The Business From Scratch Recipe Blog. A running diary of our ventures as Gifts and Games, a small business start up out of Dayton, Ohio. Mark, Kari and I, just like many of you, have the aspirations to utilize our full creative abilities, have better control over our schedules and finances and simply to live a life with its full potential.

Gifts and Games officially got it's upstart in March of 2011 by applying for and receiving our federal tax i.d. number and Ohio vendors license (we will blog about this process, fees and laws within the next few weeks). Mark and I had roughly 150 tin signs and other inventory from a previous endeavor with local summer fairs 3 years prior and decided to use eBay to sale our products to build our bank account over the course of the next few years. Our plans are to increase our inventory from a few hundred items to well up into the thousands while expanding from online sales of signs, arcade games and candy into a brick and mortar chain and warehouse/distributor.

We plan on sharing a great amount of our experiences and found knowledge within this blog to help create an outline to potentially help others cut through some of the weeds that may tangle their paths on the way to their dreams. Fill free to converse and give to this collective some of the knowledge or questions you may have!

Chad - Gifts and Games