Local shops evaluate success during holiday season

FERNDALE/BERKLEY — The holiday season is in full gear and local businesses continue to supply shoppers with gifts for their loved ones.

The success of the holiday shopping season can vary with each business, but local shops are finding for themselves that a good deal of customers are visiting their locations.

Gianna Gaizi runs her shop, Little Red Knits, out of The Rust Belt Market in Ferndale. She’s been operating her business, which sells crocheted and knitted items, for several years, but quit her other job to go full time with Little Red Knits.

So far, Gaizi believes her business has been doing well this shopping season.

“I feel like the last couple years have been a little bit slower than previous years, but there’s always an ebb and flow when you’re talking about retail,” she said. “We’re definitely starting to pick up because the holidays are getting closer.”

April McCrumb, of Catching Fireflies in Berkley, concurs, saying that business has been a little “softer” this year, but she believes that’s due to a late Thanksgiving date.

“You always use Thanksgiving as a marker that’s thinking about, ‘OK, I got to get stuff done.’ So I have a feeling it’s going to be, like, a higher surge as we get closer to Christmas too, because people are almost like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have two weeks left to do that,’” she said. “Still, business has been good. I have no complaints, but a little softer than last year.”

How to rate one’s success can be difficult to measure. McCrumb said you always can refer back to the previous year’s numbers, but ultimately you’re riding the wave of the current economy.

“You can do all the marketing and collect the most clever products and have the most festive events, but you’re still ultimately surfing the wave of what people’s mindsets are and how much money they want to spend,” she said.

As this is her first year operating a full-time business, Gaizi said things are a little different in terms of how she evaluates sales and success this season.

“Things look a little bit different as far as just being a holiday seasonal person. So that just kind of comes with different numbers for me,” she said. “I don’t really have anything else. I don’t have, like, a prior year, full year to compare it to. So this year, I’m comparing month-to-month now that we’re in the holidays, but because I am a full-time vendor, people know that they can find me there all the time. So the pressure to buy now because I’m temporary isn’t there. So it’s kind of just different.”

Both businesses also operate online as well. McCrumb noted that while she had high sales during the COVID-19 pandemic, they went back down to a base level in the years since.

McCrumb believes that online shopping is useful to help find products a customer is interested in, but a lot of customers still come into the store to ask questions in person and make purchases.

“Downtown shopping is not dead yet,” she said. “People still want to come to stores and have that experience and have the back and forth and talk to our sales gals to get more suggestions. … So that’s a huge bonus for a lot of people that come in our shop as well, especially those guys that come in at the 12th hour the day before Christmas Eve.”