Christmas Tree Seller Branches Out : Innovation: The ‘Head Elf’ of a Van Nuys company came up with the idea of having UPS deliver his trees to banks and similar institutions.
Santa’s Helpers Christmas Tree Express in Van Nuys makes the most of holiday themes, so Bob Crosby Jr. doesn’t call himself president or chief executive. Instead, he is “Head Elf.”
Call him an elf or a president, but Crosby didn’t think that he had the magic touch to make much money selling Christmas trees the old-fashioned way on vacant lots around the city.
Crosby has been selling Christmas trees in Los Angeles for 12 years. But finding cheap, vacant land and people ready to work for just three weeks during the holiday season has become increasingly tough. On top of that, Crosby found that the business was always a bit speculative since he had to order the trees from farms in Oregon well before he could gauge how sales would go at a given site.
But while Christmas tree lot sales were getting tougher, one of Crosby’s other lines--selling and delivering 10- to 20-foot trees to banks and the like--was growing faster than he could keep up with, straining his ability to deliver the trees.
So Crosby got the idea of having someone else deliver his trees--namely, United Parcel Service--and the idea is getting its first big test this year. Beginning last week, Crosby’s freshly cut, home-delivered Christmas trees were advertised locally as part of a charity fund-raising drive on KLOS Radio. The radio promotions offer delivery “from mountain to doorstep” in five days. The company has a special phone line to take the KLOS calls, and 15% of the proceeds from Christmas trees sold to callers will go to two local charities. Crosby has similar arrangements with about 20 radio stations across the country.
Crosby claims that the main advantage of his home-delivered trees is that they will arrive fresher because they’re shipped soon after being cut and don’t sit around on a lot--a particular problem in hot, dry Southern California. The problem is so bad that some dealers spray-paint Christmas trees green because they have begun to yellow by the time they are sold, although Crosby says he doesn’t follow this practice at his lots.
Prices for Crosby’s home-delivered trees are based on height. For $40, Crosby’s company will ship a 4-foot tree with a stand anywhere in the country. The 5-foot trees are $50, the 6-foot trees are $60 and the 7-foot trees are $70. Crosby said the trees are easy to set up because they arrive with a stand attached.
Crosby is so confident of his idea that even though he sold only about $400,000 worth of trees last year, he hopes to ship $3 million to $6 million worth (or 50,000 to 100,000 trees) this year.
The venture is not without risks. Crosby and his father, Bob Crosby, had to put up $100,000 for extra phone lines and voice mail equipment to take orders. In addition, they had to buy harvest rights on Douglas firs grown on 11 farms in northwestern Oregon. The rights allow Crosby’s company to cut down the trees on those farms any time in the next three or four years. In addition, the company will rent about 150 trucks to deliver trees to UPS.
Crosby is not the first to think of home-delivered Christmas trees. For five years, L. L. Bean, the big outdoor-clothing company in Freeport, Me., has been selling Christmas trees by mail order. L. L Bean ships two sizes of Christmas trees via UPS: regular size (5 feet, 4 inches to 6 feet) for $50, or large trees (6 to 7 feet) for $60, both sizes without a stand.
And some tree farms offer home-delivered trees to their established customers, according to the National Christmas Tree Assn. in Milwaukee. In fact, the association estimates that about 1% of the 34.4 million Christmas trees sold in the United States last year were mail-order sales, compared with 61% sold on a lot and 25% at “choose and cut” farms where customers fell their own trees, said Cate Miller, a spokeswoman for the group.
Crosby’s company will sell its trees in conjunction with charity groups around the country. For instance, in Los Angeles, KLOS will promote Crosby’s home-delivered trees on the air, giving 15% of the proceeds to the Foundation for the Junior Blind, which runs programs for blind people, and International Guiding Eyes, which trains seeing-eye dogs.
Nelkane Benton, KLOS’ director of community relations, said the station hopes that the deal will raise $100,000 for the charities. The arrangement is also good business for Crosby, who said that as a result of similar deals across the country, Santa’s Helpers has virtually no advertising costs.
Once Crosby decided to try the UPS delivery scheme for Christmas trees, the main problem was figuring out how to deliver 50,000 to 100,000 trees in just a few weeks. Crosby got help from his father, who has design and business experience from his computer graphics company.
The system they worked out runs like this: About 16 to 24 telephone operators for the company will take orders for trees at its Van Nuys headquarters, then send order information to both UPS and the company’s tree warehouse in Tangent, Ore.
Workers at the tree farms--all within a few miles of Tangent--will cut enough trees to fill the orders that come in from Van Nuys, then bring the trees to the warehouse. There, stands will be attached and the trees will be placed in cylindrical shipping containers. From Tangent, the company will truck the trees to one of several UPS shipping hubs around the country. UPS will then deliver the trees to the buyer’s home.
