How to sell gingerbread houses and Christmas cookie boxes: pricing, drops, corporate orders and capacity

Sell gingerbread houses and Christmas cookie boxes as pre-order drops: a fixed number of each, a release date announced ahead, a per-customer limit and one or two fixed collection or dispatch dates. Set each cap from the bench hours you have in December, price by profit per hour rather than by what last year cost, and take a deposit at booking on corporate orders. Open orders about six weeks before your first collection date, which is early November in both hemispheres; what differs north and south is the weather your gingerbread has to survive and when your customers go on holiday.

Price by profit per bench hour

In December you are not short of customers, you are short of hours. Every product competes for the same oven, bench and drying racks, so rank them by what each hour earns after materials.

An example, in Australian dollars:

Two decisions follow. The product with the lowest profit per hour either goes up in price or gets a smaller cap. And the simple, fast product deserves a bigger cap than its price suggests, because it fills the gaps between the showpieces. Check every price against its full cost, with your hourly rate in it, using the cake pricing calculator method; how to price decorated cookies has the per-dozen arithmetic for boxes.

Seasonal products carry seasonal costs: special cutters, printed boxes, cellophane and ribbon you will not use again until next year. Spread them over this year's cap, not over a hypothetical repeat.

Set the cap from your hours

Count every hour: December custom orders, markets, deliveries and the time a gingerbread house spends drying between stages. If you have 60 hours for houses at 1.5 hours each, the cap is 40, not the 60 you could sell. Leave a tenth of the hours unallocated for breakages and the order you forgot.

Houses need a structure day. Bake and cut panels in one session, let them dry, assemble in the next, and decorate after the joins have set. Build the schedule backwards from collection day and the cap falls out of it.

Run it as a drop

• Announce the date and time a week ahead, and open a waitlist so your regulars are first through the door.
• Cap each product at the number you worked out, and limit each customer, typically to two houses or three boxes, so one buyer cannot take the run.
• Fix the collection or dispatch date for the whole drop ("collect Saturday 20 December, 9am to 1pm"), so you bake to a date instead of to whatever each customer picked.
• Take full payment at order. A seasonal drop is a small, fixed-price purchase; a deposit only adds a second payment to chase in your busiest week.
• Run a second drop if the first sells out quickly, rather than raising the first cap on the day. If it sold out in minutes, the next drop can carry a higher price.

Corporate gifting: deposits and terms

Corporate orders (100 branded cookie boxes for clients, a gingerbread house for each office) are the most valuable December work and the most likely to change.

• Take a deposit at booking, 50% is the usual default, enough to cover the printed boxes, custom cutters and stencils bought for that order. See how to take a deposit.
• Set an artwork and quantity deadline, two to three weeks before dispatch, after which the quantity can go up but not down.
• Balance before dispatch for a new client. An established client with a good record can have an invoice on 7 or 14 days.
• Charge setup once per design: the logo stencil, the sample box and the proof.
• Put it in writing: quantity, unit price, dispatch or delivery dates and addresses, the artwork deadline and what happens if they cancel.

Southern and northern hemisphere timing

Northern hemisphere (US, UK, Canada). December is cold and indoor air is dry, which suits gingerbread and royal icing. The season starts earlier: US customers move from Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday of November) straight into Christmas, and UK Christmas markets open from mid-November. Open pre-orders in early November and put your last collection a few days before Christmas, with shipping cutoffs earlier again. Shipped orders face cold, which is kinder to cookies than heat but harder on couriers in the last week; shipping cakes by courier covers the cutoffs.

Southern hemisphere (Australia, New Zealand). Christmas falls in summer. Humidity softens gingerbread walls and makes royal icing sticky, and heat melts chocolate and lollies on the roof. Bake houses drier and a little thicker, seal them in cellophane as soon as they are set, and tell customers to keep them out of the sun and the fridge. School summer holidays start in mid to late December, so customers want collection earlier, not on the 23rd. Open pre-orders in early November and set your final collection a week before Christmas. The heat, the shutdown and the cash flow are covered in running a bakery through a summer Christmas.

Running Christmas in ibakepro

ibakepro, bakery management software used for seasonal releases from a home kitchen up to bakeries selling thousands of boxes, runs each Christmas release as a limited-release drop: an opening time, a waitlist, a cap per product, a limit per customer and a fixed collection, delivery or dispatch date, and it cannot sell past the cap in a rush. Drops are on Growth and Business. Corporate orders take a deposit and a balance date on a payment schedule with reminders, and the terms can be signed online with e-sign.