The Elf Shop - The pitch

Is gift giving just a little too stressful right now? Take a break and let The Elf Shop do the hard stuff. All you have to do is choose how you want your presents to look and we take care of the rest. We’ll even send you a picture of how your presents look before we mail them.

The Elf Shop - The fun part

The real puzzle here is how to organize the workers and the storage of incoming packages to be efficient. Also, there is one time of year, Christmas, where the demand could increase by a factor of ten or more. The operations would likely need to be temporarily scaled-up  for the holidays.

The Elf Shop - The growth potential

So, I couldn’t find any numbers on Christmas revenue or birthday presents, so this is going to be a little rough. There are about 300 million Americans. Only about 10% of the population would really want to use this service. So if about 10% of those people used The Elf Shop once a year for their gift giving and The Elf Shop made about $10 profit per shipment, that would be 30 million dollars a year.

The Elf Shop - The monetization

The customer pays for the wrapping costs for each of the presents as well as for the shipping to the final destination. There would be a wide selection of wrapping paper, bows, ribbons, bags, tissue paper, etc.  There could be much more revenue if the aim is to be high-end. The nicer the wrappings, the larger the margin could be.

The Elf Shop - The idea

You buy presents from online stores, and even some brick-and-mortar stores. All packages are sent to The Elf Shop, where they will wrap all of the presents and then mail them directly to the lucky recipient. This saves the shopper time and could save some money on wrapping supplies.

The Elf Shop - The motivation

Amazon and other major online retailers are typical starting points for shopping for gifts. Amazon has (passable) gift wrapping. But what if you buy something from two different places? Your options are to mail the packages directly and hope they get there on similar days or have them delivered to your house and then you have to wrap all of the presents then mail them off again, which can be a big hassle. That’s where The Elf Shop comes in.