Basketmania Continues

Here’s a peek into our back yard – you can see the Honey House in the background there. I was struck by the loveliness of the peach tree leaves and the bee boxes as I left for work this morning. Made me want to put my stuff down and get to work on our orders. But…the IT world awaited me. Anyway, I had to wait for more pine cone candles, which Mark is making at a furious pace to keep up with our orders. The opposite of the serene shot above would be the basketmania that continue this evening. We are so thrilled and thankful for the orders that have been coming in for just about everything. The baskets, however, are the most popular gift items right now and most of them need to go out this week. I made what feels like tons of baskets and used up almost everything Mark had in terms of baskets, candles, excelsior, bubble wrap…you name it, I used it up and it’s an awesome problem to have! He’s got another mountain of boxes to take to UPS tomorrow so I get a little bit of a break now, although it will probably be past 11p before we actually get to bed.

Here are some of the baskets we made, wrapped and boxed this evening. What you see on the floor is all from one order! What a great Santa. 🙂

We had a great Saturday – class was awesome, followed by a fabulous Open House. It was cold and then it started to rain but people still packed the Honey House up to 5:30-ish. We sure do appreciate everyone coming by that day and supporting our business. We hope you and your gift recipients enjoy all the goodies you bought! We’ll be and open pretty much every day up Christmas day itself so if you need teacher gifts, stocking stuffers, coworker gifts, self-indulgence-because-I’m-worth-it gifts…you know how to get a hold of us! info@gretchenbeeranch.com or 830-305-7925.

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Gift Baskets Ready to Roll

Look what came in the mail yesterday – baskets! Lots of baskets. Well, maybe not lots but a hundred baskets is more than we’ve ever had at our house. I better get busy, right? Along with these red baskets (our large), we also got some rectangular baskets (our small) and we look forward to filling them up and getting them out the door. It’s just amazing how much more we keep adding inside the honey house. 🙂

Thought we’d share with you some photos of our latest product development – gift baskets! Great for holidays, special occasions, corporate gifting, silent auctions, and general I-think-you’re-special-so-here’s-an-awesome-GBR-gift-for-you moments.

Here’s our sweet little gift basket – The Bee Wrangler. For $25.00, you get a lovely pine cone candle (almost a pound of 100% pure beeswax and so far we have 25 hours of burn time and have still not reached the 1/2 way point of the candle), a honey dipper and two 8 ounce jars of our specialty honeys – four to choose from (Huajilla, Clover, Blueberry or Orange Blossom).

And our large basket – The Honey Rustler. For $40.00, you get a pine cone candle AND a bee skep candle, a honey dipper, a 16 ounce jar of honey as well as the two 8 ounce jars, again you get to choose from our four specialty honeys.

And here’s a look at the final products all packaged and ready for delivery! If you’re interested in placing orders for now or for the holidays, please contact us at info@gretchenbeeranch.com.

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Holiday Baskets in August

Yep, it’s never too early to plan for the holidays, folks. So after a long day of work for both of us, we grabbed some dinner, ran errands and then started working on gift baskets. We needed to see what products looked like in the baskets we had purchased as samples. We narrowed it down to these four baskets so then I got to work filling them up with Mark’s help. We’ve never made gift baskets professionally but we’ve received plenty and then tried it out last year on our family members. They liked them so much, we started thinking about doing it for GBR and as more people asked for baskets to gift to others, we knew it was time to jump in with it. There’s a lot more to it than throwing products into a basket so as always, we learn a lot along the way. Our niece Clair did the legwork for us on where to find affordable baskets since one of her papers in college business class focused on our business. As a matter of fact, her proposal was for us to start offering gift baskets to grow our business – so a big thanks to Clair! We used your vendor list, honey! Then you need to also think about the filler “grass” as I call it – official name? Excelsior Moss. Fancy. We need it in bulk. And then we’ll need to find cellophane and some raffia. This should be fun because I love gift wrapping so basket making can’t be much different. 🙂 We already have about twenty baskets pre-ordered and we hope to sell many more at our holiday events and trade shows. We’ll be sure to show you the final products when we decide on everything. We will narrow it down to one small and one large basket this year. Thought we’d start out with something manageable.

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