Hal Gimlin hasn’t bought a Christmas tree in years; he’s been too busy. Too busy cramming thousands of live, seven-foot fir trees into FedEx boxes and sending them cross-country to other busy people.
‘It’s amazing how big a tree we can fit into a box,’ he says with a twinge of something between pride and astonishment. ‘They really tighten up in there.’
Gimlin’s company, Omni Farm, has turned dispatching Christmas trees to any place with a zip code into a science – and a living. All major credit cards accepted.
Thriving in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Omni Farm is one of hundreds of mail order Christmas tree companies that has sprouted roots in cyber soil. The Internet, Gimlin says, has transformed mediocre mail order into big business – about one percent annually of the $32-million-a-year Christmas tree industry. Of the 30 million trees sold last year, 333,000 were sold either over the Internet or through mail order, according to the National Christmas Tree Association.
Web sales currently stake between 20 and 30 percent of Omni’s business — a big step for a family-owned company that has been selling trees off the farm and through mail order for 30 years. With 2,100 fraser fir and white pine trees to sell this year and only 11 year-round employees, to the Gimlin’s, hawking trees on the Internet is not a novelty; it’s sound business practice.
‘The beauty of the Internet is that people come look for you,’ Gimlin said. ‘For a company my size it was very expensive in the traditional mail order venue to go out and get new customers.’
Before Omni leapt to cyberspace three years ago, Gimlin said it cost the company $8,000 a year to print and mail its ‘dinky’ 12-page catalogue, twice what it paid for its website. And because he doesn’t need to pay someone to answer the phone anymore, he saves about $5 on each online order.
Online orders are a growing, if statistically ‘negligible,’ part of the market, according to NCTA Spokesman Rick Dungey. The NCTA hasn’t been tracking online sales long enough to establish formal statistics, but Dungey said the more savvy growers are turning to the Net.
‘I think they’re just smart enough to realize that it’s a growing trend,’ he said. ‘I’m mean, [if you’re a bookseller], how many books do you have to buy from Amazon[.com] to realize that you should be on the Internet?’
In cyberspace, Omni snared a distinct niche of customers: the elderly, busy working couples and single women, according to Gimlin’s market research.
‘The traditional person with young kids wants the fun of going out to the tree lot,’ Gimlin said. ‘But a lot of my customers aren’t looking for that experience or are trying to avoid that experience.’
Older customers cannot always go out in the winter and lug home a tree, while young professionals lack the time, and single women sometimes feel uncomfortable going alone, he said. Between 70 and 80 percent of Omni Farm’s regular customers are women, and 60 percent are old enough to retire.
A sharp businessman, Gimlin still targets younger generations, hoping to cultivate a longer-lasting customer base.
‘Someone who is 75 years old,’ he reasoned, ‘the odds are they’re only going to be buying a Christmas tree from you for another five years.’ The jump to cyberspace, he thought, might snag younger customers, but instead he said more retired people just went online. By contrast, some of his buyers have too much to do.
‘We have one customer in Manhattan; she’s a violinist in the symphony, he’s a lawyer, and they just don’t have time,’ he said. ‘Convenience means a lot to them.’
In a 2000 NCTA poll, 12 percent of those polled who didn’t buy a Christmas tree said they were either ‘too busy’ or it was ‘too much trouble.’
But don’t tell Gimlin he’s just selling convenience. If ease is the main reason people turn web-ward for trees, he insists quality is next.
Most Christmas trees sit on trucks and in lots for weeks before someone takes them home, he said. Gimlin and other Web distributors claim they can deliver a nine-foot tree from stump to stoop in four days.
‘UPS comes to the house, there’s the box, you open it up and there you go,’ he said.
Getting FedEx and UPS to deliver the product isn’t a problem; however, jamming the husky trees into 9-foot-by-12-inch boxes can be tricky.
The secret is a hand-cranked tool that looks like a juicer on steroids. The tree is fed backwards into the mechanism by a revolving claw attached to the crank. With no place to go but in the box, the tree is trapped inside and tied.
For its part, the box is stitched together with industrial staples to keep it from bursting and glazed with a special wax coating to seal moisture inside. The system works almost too well. Growers claim the trees always return to their natural shape — even if it takes three days.
But while shipping is logistically simple, it can get pricey.
‘It’s not like Victoria’s Secret where … their product is four ounces,’ Gimlin said.
Depending on a tree’s weight, a grower can ship it within the lower 48 states for around $15. But once the tree gets airborne, Gimlin said, you might as well buy it a seat on the plane. ‘That’s when the price goes [way up],’ he confides.
Every Christmas, Omni Farm sends a few trees as far as Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands $500 shipping bills be damned.
Except for shipping and the boxes (which run about $7 apiece and are included in the price of the tree) Gimlin’s trees cost only slightly more than those found on most lots. A seven-foot fraser fir will run you $75. In 2000, the national average was between $4 and $8 per foot.
With Halloween creeping up, Gimlin has 400 orders already and expects to sell out by Thanksgiving.
‘More and more people are using it,’ he said. ‘As it grows, I’ll grow with it.’
As for his own Christmas tree, he has to worry about the hundreds yet to be mailed first.
‘I didn’t have one for the last couple of years,’ he admits. ‘We’re just so busy. I got a couple hundred thousand trees staring me in the face; I don’t have trouble finding one,’ he chuckles.
Always the businessman, he adds, ‘I’ll send my kids out to choose one and hopefully they won’t choose too nice a one.’