This year has made everyone think about things a little differently. We are now all forced to wear masks or be arrested in almost every part of the United States. We can no longer even shop in person without one. It has changed the fundamentals of freedom and enjoyment of the United States. This is all over a virus that is 99/7% survivable to everyone. That is pretty sad and to survive the rules and regulations and no go bankrupt the people and not the politicians have had to pivot to survive. Thinking about boxes and tape is something that I never thought could help stay afloat. The reality is that our company has made a whole lot of changes and our entire marketing section just was told to do everything in the house. That means that we are working on projects that we never have and are learning just like major marketing companies how to purchase items from the best location in order to keep costs low and our business sales high.
Our company started where we knew it was important and that was corporate gifting. We knew we needed our products to be of high quality and they had to look fancy. This is a complicated task when it comes to making regular cardboard look good. This meant being smart and methodical.
We started off by knowing our needs. We looked at what we had purchased last quarter from marketing companies and had sent out previously to see what products we would have to purchase. So we learned that we needed a specific type of box, filling, and tape. Those were the three main items to send these gifts which we would order separately depending on the company we were gifting to. Now that we knew what we needed the plan was to find the best price, shipping, and availability. That was a certainly complicated task but worth the time invested due to the cost savings we could get each quarter. The goal was to save money so we knew we needed to get all of these shipping supplies cheap and fast.
Obviously we started on Amazon. The idea was to find something that we could ship within two days and get in high quantity for a good price. This was indeed what we found, but the shipping for large quantities actually was about a week because it was not on prime for most of the products we needed. The other thing was that the custom great looking boxes were really not available. This was a viable option and I kept all of the prices in the cart because I like to be precise. We gave local stores a try as well.
The local options were not really that great. The convenience was nice because if we had an issue we could get any box, tape, or filing right away by driving down the road. But options are flat-out limitations if there are few and that is what we found. The prices were also much higher than Amazon and that was a sad thing. There were issues with the cost and that was not worth it to us for limited options. So we went online instead and that is because we had to in order to survive.