Curated Gift Box Business Marigold & Grey Reveals Whether or Not They Achieved Last Year's Business Goals

It's a good thing to set business goals at the beginning of a new year but it doesn't do any good if you don't first look back and assess your progress on the goals you made for the previous year before setting brand new goals for the year ahead. As daunting as it is, we always like to take this look back and evaluate ourselves honestly, and in this case, publicly as well. You may recall we did the same thing last year here. We believe that by putting the goals out in the open, we will then hold ourselves more accountable. Ready to find out how we did...? 

We vowed to launch a podcast.

Kicking off this report card with a big fat "F". As excited as we were to go into 2020 and begin the steps necessary to launch a podcast, Covid had other plans for us. We immediately transitioned to a skeleton crew while at the same time, our order volume skyrocketed. We are obviously so thankful for this spike as it allowed us to stay alive and even thrive during a pandemic. But it also meant that we had to focus on fulfilling orders on-time with far less help than we needed rather than taking on new ventures. Marketing fell to the wayside. Launching new gift designs took a backseat. From an operational standpoint, we found ourselves 100% in survival mode. 

We vowed to expand our Add-Your-Own-Logo Program.

This goal may have been met later in the year than we had hoped (Covid strikes again), but proud to say we did achieve this goal! We first launched our Add Your Own Logo Program back in early 2019, giving our clients the option to add their own branding to gifts in our online shop. We would remove our M&G branding from the gifts and instead include our clients' branding in the form of a logo gift tag and logo notecard. In terms of expanding the program, we've since added the option to brand gifts with a logo bellyband around the gift box along with a logo notecard. The response thus far has been incredible so the effort to bring this goal to fruition has definitely paid off. 

We vowed to re-design and re-configure our studio space.

This was a big, huge scary goal but we met it nonetheless! We knew we needed to do this at the end of 2019 coming off of a year of very significant growth. But as I stated above, when Covid hit, our online orders spiked in a way we'd never seen before and it really put our operations to the test. It's almost as if Covid came in a put a spotlight on all of our operational flaws, especially the way in which our studio was arranged. We were growing to the point where it was time to call in the experts to show us how to make best use of our space and how to prepare us for future growth. As you may recall from reading this, we hired an operations consulting firm to come in and perform an in-depth audit, exposed all of our areas needing improvement, along with a plan of how to reconfigure things and address these weaknesses. As the year progressed, the growth continued to progress and I'm so thankful we hired them when we did. We never would've survived 2020 otherwise. Operationally, we would've fallen apart without the redesign. And to be honest, we've already outgrown the redesign and may soon be looking for additional studio space. But that's a story for another day.

We vowed to grow our operations team.

We met this goal as well. With the growth we experienced, our Director of Operations was pushed to the limit and we needed to hire someone full-time to literally back her up and take some things off of her plate. Thankfully one of our part-time team members was able to step into this full-time role and she's been growing with us ever since. With the crazy year that was 2020, we sadly never even got around to formally introducing her on the blog...eek! We need to do that soon. But in the meantime, her name is Casey and you can meet her on our About Us page! She's been an amazing permanent addition to our team.

We also grew our part-time and seasonal group of team members to assist with gift assembly, shipping, receiving, and other such operational tasks. We were obviously thrilled once it was deemed safe to allow more team members back into the workplace. We so desperately needed their help! 

We vowed to redesign and expand our Ready-to-Ship Wedding Collection in the online shop.

Much like some of our other goals, this one was achieved a few months later than we had originally wanted it to, but we did it, and ended up launching a Wedding Collection that was double the size than we'd originally planned for. So I'm thinking that makes up for us being a little behind schedule, yes? Even though it wasn't ideal timing to launch a wedding-related collection during a time when weddings weren't exactly happening, it was exciting nonetheless. We added a ton of options for bride-to-be gifts, bridesmaid gifts, groomsmen gifts and even gifts perfect for vendor appreciation gifts. We also added the ability to personalize the gifts with bridesmaids' and groomsmen names which is something that our clients have been asking for for quite some time. We added options at multiple price points to accommodate slightly lower budgets as well as higher luxury budgets.

We vowed to launch a Charity Collection.

With us launching our long overdue Wedding Collection much later than we had planned, we unfortunately were unable to properly bring our new Charity Collection to market in time to hunker down and face holiday rush. This launch has now become top of our list for 2021 goals and will be the first of anything new you see from us in this New Year. While we fell short meeting this deadline in 2020, we were still able to give back in 2020. You may recall seeing on our Insta feed when we sent a large shipment of curated gift boxes to healthcare heroes in New York City and also made a sizable donation to Feeding America based on our Black Friday and Cyber Monday orders.

Stay tuned because next we will announce our goals for 2021 just as we did last year here. How did you do in accomplishing all of your 2020 goals? What are your goals for 2021? Drop us a note - we'd love to hear from you!