“While this year’s early Mother’s Day may have cut short the build-up to the occasion itself – as well as adding an extra dose of pressure! – we were pleased to say that we had our busiest one in our five years of trading,” says Libby Holden, owner of Lovely Libby’s in Rayleigh.
“The Saturday before the big day took us by storm – it honestly felt like we were back in December and just a few days away from Christmas! Given how early the occasion was, it seemed to sneak up on just about everyone, as every customer who walked through the door chaotically rushed to buy a gift for their loved one.
In fact, we saw an increase in the average spend on Mother’s Day gift buying to around the £40 mark. This may have been the result of last minute frantic impulse buys that we usually see right before Christmas, but it’s also interesting to note that we saw a shift in the type of gifts customers were leaning towards. In previous years, sentiment gifts with ‘Mum’ on them had ruled the roost as the most popular Mother’s Day presents, but this year we saw a shift towards more generalised gifting. The best-selling items seemed to be candles, clothes and bags – products that we stock in the shop all year round.
This change in spending habits may be a result of customers choosing to buy smarter within the current economic climate. It is almost as though they were making conscious decisions to buy into investment pieces, such as our Alice Wheeler bags, that would be economical in cost per wear and effectively ‘worth the money’, as opposed to smaller token items branded with “Mum” that might ultimately become dust collectors.
The only exception on this front was people looking for gifts from younger children with ‘Mummy’ on, something we took on board from last year’s Mother’s Day sales and bought more into for 2024. Going forward to next year, we had several requests for first Mother’s Day gifts. While we stock first Mother’s Day cards, gifts tailored to this is something I have never seen before (or at least, never looked out for!), so we will definitely be on the hunt for gifting along these lines for next year. There seems to be a little gap in the market here!
Something we did to relieve the load on Mother’s Day Saturday was to pre-wrap a variety of different gifts at varying prices in cellophane. Complete with a Lovely Libby’s bow, we placed these on a display right at the front of the shop for people to literally grab and go. They were a huge hit among everyone from children popping in after school, to dads rushing in the day before with their children in tow. It definitely made the gift buying experience smoother and easier, while the benefit of free giftwrap meant there was one less thing for the customer to have to think about. They could literally just hand the gift over.
As with the previous two years, we also offered our Mother’s Day gift boxes on our website. Customers could log on, choose any gifts from our collection and curate their own bespoke Mother’s Day gift for their loved one, safe in the knowledge that everything would arrive in a branded Lovely Libby’s box, with each item wrapped individually, and with a personalised gift note included.
We heavily promoted these on our social media, running adverts on different platforms, and were extremely pleased with the results. We had new customers from all over the country ordering boxes, and even had a couple of orders from people for non-Mother’s Day gifts. Since the boxes are only branded with the Lovely Libby’s logo, some customers were going online to create a personalised gifts for all kinds of different occasions. For example, one lady put together a ‘Thinking of You’ box for a friend who was recovering from an operation. She put in an array of different items – from a pair of our bamboo socks, to one of our hand painted drinks tumblers by Lynsey Johnstone, and it’s really got us thinking about how we could potentially make this incentive an all year round option for all sorts of occasions.”
Top: Libby Holden, owner of Lovely Libby’s in Rayleigh.
