Saturday Gift Post--New Stuff in the Store, Including Contorting Wooden Snakes and a Blank Book Display that Finally Has Wheels.

I hoped to attend the Minneapolis gift show this weekend, but wound up getting cold feet and staying home. I had the usual panic attack before leaving the store, combined with a "what exactly am I looking for if I spent the whole week receiving gift items?" moment.

On the kids side, we restocked our basics, as we were quite low on puzzles and craft kits. The Easter puppets came in from our favorite puppet vendor--we've put out a teaser table. One customer put in a special order on our notorious bendable robots. Since this was the second request in a short period of time, we restocked. I also brought in these animal whatzits (pictured.) The bendable pirates are on backorder, which is a bit sad, as we wanted them for our "pirate galley-on giveaway" next weekend. Note to publishers: old galleys, old ones. With the purchase of a book. More on that later.

On the adult side, we finally got the remaining pieces of our schmancy new spinner rack, meaning it is tall enough to not look like it belong's in the kids section, and it also has wheels. Our Tag Easter items came in. Last year was definitely rabbit-centric, but I seem to be moving in a more chick-friendly direction.

Tables are moving around a bit. Only a week left of our St. Patrick's display. We decided to go with Celtic cards, journals, and boxes, as they are suitably Irish and yet fit in with our everyday items. We got our first request for St. Patrick's Day cards. We were going to send this customer elsewhere, when he saw our boxed Celtic cards and bought them.

It's very important for us to repurpose our gift items into multiple displays because a) otherwise, we wouldn't know what to do with them and b) we don't have quite enough traffic to sell through everything super fast and I like to change displays relatively quickly, when possible. So the map-related items on the travel table (cards, paperweights, coasters) turn into items for the graduation table. Most of the spring items transition into Mother's Day. If we have a few rabbit puppets left after Easter, they go on the puppet rack.

Of course there's always a little to mark down. But we just took away our markdown table for a while, replacing it with a new home for our tee shirts. We have restocked book jacket tees with designs we sold best and added a few new designs--The Great Gatsby and The Old Man and the Sea. Should be coming in a few weeks. And we're also working on our spring special edition tee shirt. More on that later.