Professional Gift Wrapping Service - Thoughts?

[MamaOfWobbles]

I'm thinking of starting a little business to earn a little money whilst my little one is young and I'd really appreciate your thoughts/ comments.

I'm thinking about starting a local gift wrapping business and the questions I have at the moment are listed below.

Do you feel you would use this service?

If yes, would you prefer to pay by number/ size of presents or by the hour?

Would you prefer to provide your own wrapping paper, have a choice/ styles to choose from/ or a mixture of both?

Would you want to travel to my home/ have me come to yours/ drop and either collect or have them delivered back to you/ or have me collect and deliver back?

Would you be interested in different levels of wrapping service styles - ie. bronze, silver, gold

Labels - would you want to provide/ write your own, have professional ones provide but you write, provided and written on/ or given the option? How much extra would you pay for labels?

What sort of turnaround time would you expect/ would you pay extra for priority wrapping?

Should I consider offering themed wrapping - ie. nature/ Christmas/ Easter?

Anything else I should think about/ comments?

I honestly don't mind good or bad! Thank you

I would potentially use it but only if it was incredibly convenient and I had to do nothing except pay for it. So ideally I'd want the service to be available at the point of purchase and the item to then be delivered to me once wrapped. Or at a minimum for it to be collected from my house then delivered back to me. (Possibly for someone to come and do the wrapping in my own home.)

In a nutshell, convenience would be the over riding factor for me. Lots of shops do offer a gift wrap service so it would have to compete with them in terms of ease of use and price.

I'd be more likely to use it at Christmas when I have a lot of presents to wrap than for one-offs like birthdays.

I feel Instagram would be your friend - looking at photos of beautifully wrapped presents would be a motivator for me.

HTH!

I wouldn't use something like this. DH hates wrapping, but wouldn't organise using it, but has discovered one shop in our town will put things in a nice bag with tissue paper and a bow and now goes there to buy for his mum/sil because of that.

I wouldn't use it myself, I like the ritual or wrapping presents in front of a film with some wine.

However in the current climate if you offered an eco option, eg brown paper / newspaper and ribbon with no / minimal sellotape, that could be a money spinner! People keen to make / look like they're making a change without having to make any real effort

Don't make the eco option more expensive though! Maybe even make it cheaper, that would send a good message

You would be best to try to find a company or business that needs such a service (so maybe corporate gift company that produces gift bags or promo items). Or something like an airline that puts those little fancy wrapped chocolate boxes in first class (so I have been told).

Do you think people in your area can afford to pay extra for such a service? Harrods has a gift wrapping service, but I've never seen it anywhere else.

I saw one recently - I think it was in a supermarket as a pop up.

I saw on crime watch a pop up shop doing this in a shopping centre. They replaced anything of value with potatos and bricks and stole the presents. Obviously no one knew they had been robbed until the presents were opened.

I don't think I would use this service and definitely not if you collected the presents from me and returned them wrapped. I'm not normally untrusting but that sounds like it's asking for me to be scammed! Come Christmas day the presents unwrapped could be empty boxes and you could have disappeared, or just have got muddled.

Would you have insurance against any breakages?

It’s not something I would use.

If I were going to, it would only be in a shop at the point of purchase.

It's a no from me.

"I saw one recently - I think it was in a supermarket as a pop up"

The Ines I've seen in supermarkets are charity stalls - supermarket donates the paper, volunteers wrap (usually adequately) and shooters donate to the charity. Can be handy, but usually done on a whim, as a way of getting a chore done whilst helping a good cause.

I'm probably not your target market, because although I could probably afford this sort of thing, I wouid not pay for it. Because I see it as unnecessary spending, and that's quite a hard sell in the current economic situation.

I think you will need to be incredibly convenient to your potential customers, so will need to offer collect and deliver service, as well as wrapping in home, at office, etc. You will need to be ready to use clients paper, and offer a selection of your own, and agree that the eco option needs to be the cheapest whilst still looking just as good.

You need to have a foolproof way of labelling things accurately, that you can describe simply.

And complete reliability on timing of job with no overruns ever, and of collection and delivery times.

I'm waiting for a DPD parcel that was meant to have left the depot yesterday, so am probably a little oversensitive about non appearances at the moment!

It's a nice idea but, I think to be honest you'd find it difficult to get the take up. By the time I've contacted you, discussed how I'd like the wrapping to look, arranged to hand over the presents, picked up/taken delivery of the wrapped presents, and paid you, it feels it would be so much less hassle to do it myself, even though I know you'd do a much better job!

The only way I could see it working would be at point of sale, so would involve you having a stall at Christmas craft fayres, late night shopping events etc. At events such as that, I would be prepared to pay around £1 per present.

Agree with PP, I wouldn't use it as I would be highly suspicious of dropping off valuables to a stranger and expecting to get them back. The crimewatch scam was already mentioned above - that is what I would be fearful of. I also can't imagine how you could make much money from this is you are supplying the paper and bows etc.

You would need to aim it at affluent areas in a £15/20 per hour type structure I reckon. Meaning you turn up to their house with your selection of paper and bows and wrap as much as you can in the hour, or how ever long hired for. I simply cannot think of another way you would do it as charging per gift wrapped doesn't work as they could be tiny/huge/awkward shapes.

Nice idea but not very functional to be rolled out.

I wouldn't use it - sorry, initially I thought it was a good idea but honestly, once I'd gotten to thinking about logistics... it's would probably take longer to organise than just wrapping the presents myself!

Now, if you were to offer a gift search, purchase, wrap and deliver service I might be interested... however... it would still have to beat Amazon Prime with Gift Wrap for simplicity and that's going to be hard, especially with the pretty, reusable gift bags they have started using.

I’ve seen John Lewis have a wrapping counter but no idea how much. I wouldn’t pay someone to wrap a present mostly because I love wrapping! Also I’d be worried they’d get stolen or tampered with.

Sorry OP but it’s a no from me.

Handing over a pile of valuables to a stranger just isn’t something I’d do.

Also, I don’t see wrap gifts as something I’d spend a lot of time/effort/money on. Like, maybe if a shopping centre with full insurance against breakage/loss offered it for £1/present, I might consider it, but wouldn’t have it done outside of that setting due to convenience/risk factor.

They had this at the Harlequin Centre in Watford about 20 years ago. I was baffled by it then and I'm baffled by it now.

Sorry, not something I would consider using.

My local shopping mall offers this service for charity (£1 per item and they supply materials)

Sorry, I wouldn't be interested either, for a number of reasons;

• Xmas is expensive enough as it is.
• convenience of getting the presents wrapped.

-,what would you do if someone accuses you of breaking a gift?

• some shops will gift wrap or put the items in a nice bag anyway.

Maybe you could look at making up gift wrapping kits and selling those Eg hand decorated boxes and bags, or wrapping paper kits with the decorations and instructions included, so that people can wrap themselves.

If you could produce something sustainable, that could go down very well.

I just keep thinking of Rowan Atkinson gift wrapping the necklace up in Love Actually 😂😂

Personally no, I find wrapping pretty quick and easy, and I quite enjoy it. But to be honest, I don't think Mumsnet is going to have much of your target audience anyway. It's full of people who love wrapping presents, have stashes of ribbon and home-made tags, and will head out into a blizzard on January 2nd to buy dozens of rolls of wrap for next year.

If I have to imagine the person in who would use a wrapping service, my immediate, perhaps uncharitable, mental image is a man who likes to spoil his partner with lots of flash, expensive-looking gifts but doesn't want to put any thought, effort or time in beyond actually spending money. He probably isn't on Mumsnet.

Sorry OP, but not, I wouldn't use this. Years ago we went to New York and I bought a birthday gift in one of the well known department stores who offered gift-wrapping. I decided we would have it gift wrapped as I fell it would be part of the NYC experience. I have never been so disappointed in all my life - the choice of paper was poor, it was also thin and poor quality . The absolute minimum quantity of paper was used - hardly any overlap at the joins and, horror of horrors, the join was on the front of the wrapped package. Gift tags were also poor and didn't match the paper. It cost a fortune - I could have bought a sheet of better quality paper, a bow and matching tag from their stationary department for a fraction of the cost.
Whilst I don't especially enjoy wrapping, I certainly make a better job of it than the one gift-wrap service I've used. I like the idea of gift wrap sets - I'd definitely be interested in those.

If you could arrange a pop-up at a high-end retailer then offering something quirky and eco-friendly like furoshiki might work. I'd pay for that.

How about looking into the Japanese way of using beautiful fabric for wrapping - that would interest me

m.youtube.com/watch?v=E026wJnLp1w