Do you cross-merchandise paper products with gifts to stimulate sales of both?

Cross-merchandising greeting cards and other products doesn't work. At first I grouped Mary Engelbreit cards with Mary Engelbreit merchandise, for example. But people couldn't find what they were looking for. They wanted a birthday card or some other specific sentiment, not a Mary Engelbreit card. I resisted grouping the cards together for four years, but at the end of last year I finally sold my scattered card racks and put up a wall of nice Plexiglas fixtures in time for the Christmas season. Our card sales doubled, and people started buying four or six of a single card. However, we do mix stationery with our giftware. I do my store in color stories, and we group notepads, stationery, and paper napkins in with our merchandise.

About 50 percent of our paper is cross-merchandized. Quite often we'll mix the paper products with gifts that are related, such as an Asian or a men's theme. We display our pieces either by shelves or cubicles, which allows us to tell a story. One display might be an animal skin theme, and next to it might be a theme of leaf designs or bamboo. We'll include picture frames, desk lamps, journals, albums, address books, and notepads. The papers we do best with are elegant or unusual handmade designs from Thailand, Indonesia, or Africa. While people might not look in the stationery section, they might find something in the display because the theme interests them.

There's one section of our store that's just journals. But we also pull journals and photo albums, and merchandise them into the gift lines in the rest of the store. We do displays that are holiday and theme related, and we'll mix photo albums and journals into all of those themes. We sell a lot of photo albums for weddings. They do very well when we cross-merchandise them with glassware to make a great gift idea. With graduation gifts we mix in both journals and albums. We merchandise by color as well. For example, our handmade papers and florals are very colorful, and they merchandise beautifully with colored glass. But we don't add greeting cards to the mix because they're single items. We display them in their own racks.

We don't carry a lot of paper, but we do sell unusual handmade greeting cards. Sometimes when I do a display, I'll throw some cards in to give customers the idea that this might be a good wedding or birthday gift. I've also done it for Valentine's Day and other occasions. If I have a selection of cards I'll stand up two or three to give a display some height. I've sold some cards right off the display. We'd sold a lot of merchandise in the holiday season, and after the first of the year our displays were looking pretty bare. So I added wrapped gift boxes and cards to fill them out. We keep the cards at our cash wrap, and I always make a point of asking customers if they need a card with their gift.