Personalized Gift Ideas by Stocking Factory

We have selected some of our best selling Christmas Stockings for wholesale trade.  The minimum order is just 12 stockings per part number for wholesale orders  :

Our wholesale Christmas stockings  are available for immediate shipment, usually shipping within 1 business day from the payment receipt.

These wholesale holiday stockings are shipped blank, without any personalizing or embroidery.  You can find our wholesale Christmas stockings  catalog here.

If you wanted large quantities of personalized/customized Christmas stockings with embroidered names, logos we can accommodate such requirements as well.  Please  call our customer service at 800-761-XMAS

We get lots of calls from customers who previously purchased our personalized Christmas stockings during previous seasons, looking for the same Christmas stocking, wanting to add one or two more.  Often a customer cannot find the matching Christmas stocking because we no longer have it in stock.

I looked around the web and retail stores and could not find a single vendor who would provide an information on the availability of the stocking they currently sell for the future years.  So here we go, we are the first Christmas stocking shop to address this very valid customer need for this important information.

Most Christmas stocking retailers do not manufacture their own inventory and thus are dependent  on the manufacturer for their next holiday season inventory.  If you plan to buy a set of Christmas stockings anywhere, ask the sales person if they will have the same stocking next year.  Most likely the answer would be: “I don’t know” or “Probably not”.  Perhaps you have already gone through an effort to try to find a same stocking your bought 3 years ago and most likely could not find it at the same retailer.

That’s where we are different.  One of the reasons we begun to manufacture our own stockings was the need to provide our customers with the same or similar personalized Christmas stocking they bought from us few years back.  It just makes sense when you care about your customers.

When you spend a part of your Christmas decorating budget on purchasing Christmas stockings, have them personalized, it is a good idea to think ahead :

• Is your family going to grow in the next few years?
• Are you planning to have another child?
• Is your daughter or son going to get engaged or married?
• Will your family members visit you for Christmas; and if so, do you want to add a Christmas stocking with their name on it?
• Are your parents or grandparents visiting for Christmas?  Having a personalized Christmas stocking for them might be an unexpected and welcome surprise.  Finding a stocking that would match the set you already have might prove a challenge.

Those are the situations we most often hear about from our customers, when they call in looking to match a Christmas stocking they previously purchased in our online store.

Considering that your family might grow in the near future will save you lots of effort trying to find and match the Christmas stocking set that you already have.

We have many different Christmas stocking designs in our store: some we manufacture or have manufactured for us every year so there is a good chance that you will be able to buy a set of personalized Christmas stockings in that design this year and find a matching one 3 years from now.  Other stockings are sourced by us from other vendors and factories.  In that situation, we do not have control if the supplier will carry the same Christmas stocking design into the next season.  There are many reasons for the particular Christmas stocking design not being available the following year:

• All Christmas manufacturers follow new trends in Christmas decorating and introduce new styles for their products.   With a new style introduction, previous years’ models get retired.
• The materials and fabrics that were available previous season to the Christmas manufacturer may not be available this year, thus the factory is forced to change the existing design.
• That particular design did not sell as many units as other designs so it is being replaced by another Christmas stocking that sells better.

We have a mix of Christmas stocking designs that change from one season to another and also maintain designs that remain relatively same so our customers can match the stockings from previous seasons.  Sometimes, however, the fabric suppplier no longer manufactures the exactly same color shade or composition of the material used in the manufacturing of the Christmas stocking, so in spite of our effort to maintain the same stocking design for our customers, we are left with no choice  but to accept a design that is similar but not identical to the previous seasons’ stockings.

Starting in August 2009 we will enhance our online catalog displaying all of our stockings with additional information that will provide you with the likelyhood of our maintaining the same design/model of the Christmas stocking into the next year.    Each Christmas stocking description will contain the information if the stocking is likely to be available next year or not.  This will help you to make educated purchase decision when it comes to future planning for matching your Christmas stockings as your family grows.

Based on the Christmas stockings you like in our online catalog, you can either choose a set of the personalized Christmas stockings that match, or design “missmatched” set.

If you purchase a matching set and our product information page indicates that the likelyhood of our bringing the same stocking into inventory in the future years is low, we suggest that you might purchase extra one or more or more blank stockings from the same inventory so you can add to your set as your family grows.  We would be happy to personalize your stocking with consistent personalizing in ebmroidery that matches the set you already have.  Usually we ask you for the original purchase information, such as your name and address or an order number so we could locate the original order in our records and match the embroidery names with the original.  You would send us the blank stocking with a payment for personalizing only and the shipping cost for priority mail USPS and we will add personalizing to the blanks for you and ship them back promptly.  Yjos provides our customers with a nice way to keep the set of personalized Christmas stockings consistent as their family grows.

Another way of dealing with matching your Christmas stockings as your family expands is not matching them at all.  If you have a set that seemingly does not match, then you will have no problem adding a different stocking to the mix in the future holiday seasons.  If you decide for this option, you can still do some matching, for example you can choose all stockings to be same or similar size.  We mainly sell 18″, 19″, 20″ or larger Christmas stockings.   You can see a tip section on how to measure a Christmas stocking.  The 18″, 19″, 20″ Christmas stocking sizes are the most popular, because they are the perfect size for display while they fit enought of stocking stuffers.

We hope this enhancement to our online catalog will result in overall savings and better customers satisfaction.  If you have additional comments and suggestions on this topic please feel free to leave your comments in the comments area on the bottom of this page.

We get a lot of requests to help our customers with ideas for Christmas Stocking stuffers.  We scout the internet year round for helpful ideas so here is a short list to help you.  Let’s start with some Christmas stocking stuffers on a budget:

• Build up a small gift stash discovering nice items on sale year round.  If you have some room in a cabinet or extra closet space, it can become a gift stash where you accumulate small gifts bought on sale during the year.
• Stick with generic gifts, those can come in handy when your child brings a birthday party invitation last minute and you do not have the time to go hunting for a gift.
• Some generic gift ideas for kids may include board games, picture books, art supplies, puzzles, science kits.
• Family members will appreciate a photo frame with their picture or a picture of your family, especially if the picture is current.  A picture frame for $3.50 on sale with a photo is one of those gifts that very goes a long way on very small cost.
• The key is to plan ahead.
• Don’t buy clearance items just because they are on sale.  Give it some thought.  Allocate the item to a specific person or occasion, if possible: Father’s Day, Stocking Stuffer for a Child, birthday gift for a child, office Christmas party gift exchange,… you can keep track of your categories with an inventory sheet so you do not overbuy for one area while having the other empty.  It is a good idea to keep the inventory sheet with the gifts, just tack it on the wall in the same area where you keep the gift stash.
• How often do your kids ask you to buy them this and that which they see advertised on TV or on various websites?  If you have it in the budget, you can buy the gift now but hide it with your stash and gift it to them for an occasion such as Birthday or Christmas.
• Add some often used items to your Christmas Stocking stuffer stash: rechargeable batteries, blank cds, memory cards,  accesory or expansion module for their favorite game or gadget.
• If there is still space in the Christmas stocking, some candies or a favorite food that won’t spoil may fill the rest of the space.
• Don’t forget to have the Christmas stocking personalized.  We have a nice guide how to personalize  a Christimas stocking , if you are the crafty type.  Or you can order personalized Christmas stockings from our online store.  Our stockings are personalized in beatifull embroidery.

Our customers are just so incredibly creative!

From an order just shipped :  Our customer Robert from Yarmouth ME just  invented the “Birtday Stocking”.  Robert wrote to us:

I realize this is a Christmas stocking, but the lettering is correct, I’m inventing the “Birthday stocking”.

What a great idea Robert! Here is a picture of the finished Personalized Pink Chrismas Stocking AKA “Birthday Stocking”

The item is actually our Pink Christmas Stocking personalized in pink metallic embroidery, which is very popular as Baby’s First Christmas Stocking but lot of our customers have these Christmas Stockings personalized with just a name for girls who love pink stockings.

The Pink Metallic Embroidery just takes this plush Christmas Stocking from cute to gorgeous!

Past few seasons we have added customer convenience / interaction features to our websites.

With every new interactive feature, the server that powers the website has to work harder.  The more customers on the website – the larger demand on the servers to keep up.

Sometimes we hold off on publishing some special features for a reason.  It is better to have a fast website where customers can find what they are looking for and check out quickly …who needs additional frustrations while Christmas shopping online, right?   But as internet changes, so do the demands of our clients,  who come to expect a certain level of conveniences added to their online shopping.  We usually pride ourselves on bringing the best website features to our customers!

Our customer can design a Christmas ornament online in our Online ornament designer: You can design ornaments from individual elements or use our Christmas ornament pre-design templates.  Our brides, for example, love to design their wedding favors ornaments online for their Christmas wedding guests.   The customers who shop for our Christmas stockings can now personalize their Christmas stocking online and preview what the personalized stocking will look like before they add it to their shopping cart.
These are really terrific features and our customers love them.

Such features add convenience and enrich your shopping experience.  We on the other hand try to make sure that our servers are able to keep up with very high demand and present these interactive features without delays in page loads.  During the Christmas season we have thousands of visitors on our websites at any given time.  So our preparations for smooth online shopping season begin early every year.

One tool we utilize is load testing on the server for http://www.centrinet.com/christmas .  Load testing simulates traffic of number of visitors browsing any specific page on our website at the same time.   We also run different page optimization tests, to see where we can improve our site download times so the visitors with slower internet connections would not be left out.   We intentionally employ only well established browser technologies so our visitors do not have to download additional browser plugins.  For example, our  preview  of embroidered names on Christmas stockings is coded in technology that does not require flash plugin for a browser, so customers without flash plugin can still enjoy previewing the personalization on our Christmas stockings.

Each section of our website does different task and we work dilligently to make the web site and service as fast and responsive as possible.  We hope that our customers will have a pleasant experience shopping with us.  If you are one of our customers and need help with any aspect of our site, please feel free to use the contact us section of our site, where you can find our email, address and phone numbers.  You can also post any comments and suggestions regarding our website here.

We receive a lot of requests for Christmas stocking and other Christmas decoration donations during the holiday season.

Sometimes we have purchased inventory that is not suitable for personalizing or does not fit into our product mix. Other times we have just a tiny quantity left from the past season which is unsuitable to present in our online catalog the following season since the quantity left is too small. As we personalize our Christmas stockings, at times we make a mistake: customer ordered personalizing in script font but our production personalized it in block font, so we also have some perfectly good personalized stockings which are not suitable for sale.

So we take all these odds and ends and send them to the organization in need of Christmas stockings as a donation when they request it.

Past couple of seasons the requests exceeded the availability of what we can donate. Perhaps it’s these tough economic times. So we came up with an idea: why not ask our website visitors to send in their old stockings since they are purchasing new ones?

Or, if you are a crafter, visiting our site and feel like making some Christmas stockings that will go to a good cause, make some Christmas stockings and send them to us.

We can in turn combine our overstock and the Christmas stockings you send in and together we can make a difference donating them to the needy or a good cause.

Here are some examples of the type of requests we received:

…we are trying to give our homeless and need family students Christmas Stockings. I was wondering if you would know where I could get some donated Christmas stockings? About 350 of them. Thank you for your time.

I am a wife of a deployed soldier. I am an active member of our Family Support Group and also am a leader for the group. I am in search of stockings that we can get to fill with goodies and send them to our guys who are currently in Iraq. Our family support group is gathering goods and monetary donations for help fill the stockings. Do you sell stockings in large amounts? We are looking for approximatley 180 of them

Would you be willing to make stockings for our national guard unit?
They will be deploying to Afghanistan in the spring.  It would be great if you could donate 100 or so.
For our families!  Thanks for your consideration…

…if your company would be able to once again donate any Christmas stockings for the ‘Support the Troops’ project we sponsor here …. We provide support to 250 soldiers, and we could use about 150 more stockings. Last year you were very generous in your donation, but I was hoping you might be able to assist us again this year …

Our school St Francis Xavier will be integrating Easter, Christmas, and New Years Around the World as the theme for 2008-2009 school year. We would like to know if you can donate any display ornaments or discontinued garths, wreaths, pictures, easther bunnies, eggs, etc. from your company or ornaments of different countries. This writer would like to know if you can send us any brochures of these events in your country

My family and I are adopting a group of soldiers for Christmas and would like your help in making this endeavor a success. We need 15 empty Christmas stockings to ensure that each person in the squad receives their own.  Would your company be able to donate a couple stockings to help make this a success?

Let’s combine our resources and together we can make a difference. During past 20 years we have donated what we could but have not made a focused effort to streamline our donations. The donation requests usually come during the busiest time of the year for us, so it was always a great challenge to keep the pace with timely shipping to our customers and manage the “extras” such as donation requests. Thus this year we designed our donation program early so we can effectively donate what we can.

So if you wanted to send any extra Christmas stockings you have around the house or make a few for the needy children or our troops :

Send the Christmas stocking donations to:

Stocking Factory
960 Bay Dr
Summerland Key, FL 33042
Mark the box: STOCKING DONATIONS

We shall warehouse your donations and combine those with ours and make sure that these stockings donated from the heart will make happy Christmas where it counts the most!  We will make sure they are well packed and ship them safely to their recipients. Shipping costs to the recipients of your/our Christmas stockings are rising but we utilize post office and are very good at getting the best rates, so so far we have been able to pay for the shipping expenses when we donate our stockings.

If you are an organization in need, please post a comment on this page and also please email us with your request through our contact form page. We will monitor both email and this page for requests.

Help us to spread the word so those who are in need would learn about our help effort! Post about our Christmas stocking donations on your Website, MySpace, Blog or favorite message board.

You can also follow us on Twitter to keep up with what we are doing now.

Christmas is the special time of a year when many families enjoy decorating their house to get into the spirit of the season.

When you think Christmas Stockings, you would naturally envision them on the fireplace mantle.  Did you know that fireplace and a Christmas stocking traditions are closely related?  You can read up on the history of Christmas stockings. A fireplace mantle is an ideal (and the most traditional) place to display your Christmas stockings because it is usually the focal place of your living room.  The mantle can be further decorated with garland, candles, Christmas figurines and collectibles and even a Christmas train.

Do not forget the Stocking Holders.  If you plan to place lot of stocking stuffers in your Christmas Stockings, remember the stockings will be rather heavy, so you want to get a heavy stocking holder.  If you have a light stocking holder, it will tip over as you place the stocking stuffers in the stockings.  A stocking holder also called a stocking hanger should have a nice large hook, not a tiny one.  A large hook assures the stocking will not tip over when filled with lots of heavy stocking stuffers.

But what if you do not have a fireplace?  No problem, we do not have one either.  We have giant glass door panels in our living room with a metal drapery rod to darken the room when we watch a movie.  So one of our kids invented a clever way to place our Christmas stockings on hooks spaced evenly on the courtain rod.  It looked great and it became a tradition.

You can be creative decorating with Christmas stockings even if you do not have a fireplace.

• We have seen people placing their stocking hangers on window mantel.
• You can also find a free standing floor stocking hanger or improvise with tower holders and hooks available in hardware stores.  You can use those items for the rest of the year in their traditional settings.
• Find a decorative ladder available in folk art / gift / decorator stores / online.  These ladders are not designed to climb on, they are rather just that: decorative ladder.  If you can find one, buy it and set it against a blank wall, then you can hang your Christmas stockings there.  If you cannot find one in local stores, you may just as well make one.  Use some twigs and wire to tie the ladder together.
• Another cool way to place your stockings is to clear one of the wall shelves and hang your Christmas stockings on the invisible hooks right under the shelf and then decorate the shelf with other Christmas decorations, such as presents, candles, decorative boxes, Nutcrackers or Christmas village houses…. or a Christmas train.  This creates a Christmas ambiance focal point in your living room out of what used to be just a regular book or knick knack shelf.
• Don’t forget the coat hanger!  Especially the wall mouted ones are good candidates to display your holiday stocking.
• If you have a staircase to an upper floor, you may want to hang your Christmas stockings on the banister and decorate around them with a Christmas garlands and ribbons.
• 
• One year we placed our stuffed stockings right under the Christmas tree, just stood them up surrounding the whole tree.
• You can also utilize your cabinet knobs.  If you have a wall unit in your living room, experiment with the look of Christmas stockings hung from it’s cabinet knobs.
• An empty wall space may also work.  You can purchase a removable 3M wall hooks from any hardware store, they also make these hooks in many decorator colors to match your wall and color scheme.  You can hang the stockings directly on the hooks or you can create a wall theme, using a ribbon, garland branches attached to a rope or wire ribbon and then attach the stockings to it ( think clothesline setup ).
• A dresser or a curio may be another good candidate to hang your Christmas stockings.  Use it’s knobs or place your stocking holders on top of the dresser and compliment with other Christmas decorations such as garland and ribbons.
• Hang your Christmas stockings off top of your bookcase or a TV stand
• Uses suction cups and hang them from your glass sliding doors or windows which looks adorable from the inside and outside
• A  shelf with pegs works just great for this purpose.
• You can hang the Christmas stockings from the ceiling.

With little immagination, you can turn your ordinary space into Christmas Oasis.

It may be more difficult for a shopper to find a large selection of Christmas stockings or Christmas ornaments this year.  It takes some planning to get your Christmas shopping done without stress and without breaking your bank.  Many major retailers are placing their holiday orders with caution now and this will probably result in a lesser selection of Christmas decorations on the market for 2009 season.  According to this article :

Factories abroad “are on edge,” said Josh Green, chief executive of Panjiva, which tracks U.S. Customs data on shipments by global suppliers to the United States. One in four major Chinese manufacturers shipped less than half as much to U.S. customers in November through January than they did a year earlier, he said.

Determined not to repeat last year’s holiday season, when retailers amassed so much stock they offered rampant discounts to clear it out, they are leaning toward more practical and lower-priced items.

And they’re cutting holiday inventory 5 percent to 10 percent from last year’s levels and perhaps 20 percent at luxury stores, said Craig R. Johnson, president of consulting group Customer Growth Partners.

Call us crazy but we are doing the exact opposite, we are ordering more Christmas items  and in larger quantities than ever to offer our personalized Christmas stockings  at the best price possible, without suffering from inventory shortages.

Early Bird gets the worm! In our store, the best selection of Christmas stockings is always between July and the end of November.  That’s when we bring in fresh inventories and are stocked well for the upcoming holiday season.  As everyone begins to shop, some of our items sell out, no matter how many we bring in – so if you see a Christmas stocking you like, grab it right away.

You will see most discounts and best promotions during the off-season : from January through July.  The closer to Christmas, the busier we get and as we reach our capacity in personalizing and shipping our Christmas Stockings and Christmas Ornaments, we are not able to provide additional discounts and sales because we would not be able to keep up with the demand and ship on time.

So if you find a Christmas stocking or personalized Christmas ornament in our store during the off-season and want to save money, it is a good idea to make the purchase right away.  You will avoid the stress of Christmas rush and most likely score the best price of the season.  You are invited to preview our large selection of Christmas Stockings on Sale.

Everyone tries to stretch their budget in tough economic times.

That’s why we are looking for ways to provide our customers with as many options as possible.

Up until now we have offered most of our Christmas stockings personalized only.  The personalization was included in the price of the item to make things simple. That’s how most companies who specialize in personalization do it.

One might ask: “Why not offer the same item blank? ” That’s a good question. In our case, we have a pretty high volume and like to offer as many different Christmas stocking designs as possible. So we maximize the inventory and hope to stock up on as many items as our customers would like. This broad inventory offering gives us each of our Christmas stocking designs in a limited quantity which is the reason we reserved our inventories for personalized sales only.

The emphasis is on the limited quantity. We have learned from the past 20 years in the Christmas sales that it is more attractive to carry 100 different designs in smaller quantities than 10 different designs in huge quantities.  Thus we plan our inventories according to that rule and pretty much sell out of most of the Christmas stocking designs we carry each season.

A little side note: for best selection, shop early!  We have all of our inventories in full display by mid October but start selling our of some Christmas stocking designs as early as mid November.

This year we have added another dimension to item availability on our site.  We are bringing more more designs in larger quantities than ever.  We have effectively tripled the number of Christmas stockings planned for 2009 season.

2009 appears to be a tough year for our customers, so we are doing our part to bring the costs down for you:

• We are locating new sources for our Christmas stockings so we can offer unprecedented selection of high quality new designs at awesome low pricing.
• We are buying more of each item so our manufacturers would give us the rock bottom prices so we can pass those savings onto you PLUS offer you the option of personalized or blank Christmas stockings.
• We are also offering some of our Christmas stockings for wholesale trade.

We believe this is a WIN-WIN strategy for all of us.  Our customers will have more choices and lower pricing and we are looking forward to another better-than-ever holiday season.  Look for our new products that will be introduced in Spring/Summer 2009! Thank you for shopping Stocking Factory.

We believe that communication is critical to full customer satisfaction.

That’s why we maintain a comprehensive array of ways for our customers can reach us.

Aside from email, the most critical aspect of communication carrier is a phone service. We have a number of traditional land lines which are integrated with modern internet based call routing features.

These additional features allow us to expand the availability of customer service during the holiday season. We get more incoming calls in one day during November than in a whole month of May. Naturally, the demand for our personalized Christmas stockings and ornaments is at it’s peak during that time of a year.

For a seasonal business like ours, it is important to be able to expand and contract our phone lines so we can handle the busy times without experiencing the cost of extra overhead year round, thus keep the product cost to our customer as low as possible.

Google just announced the availability of Google Voice. This service is based on call routing/forwarding of an incoming call to one or more phone numbers.

This is a critical feature that helps us satisfy the increased demand for incoming phone lines. Let me explain. As a seasonal business, we need to be able to answer over 100 times the incoming phone calls in October/November and December. It would not make sense to pay for many additional land lines year round as we aim to keep the product cost to our customers as low as possible. So here is where Google Voice comes in. Adding a single Google Voice phone number lets us expand out phone system by as many phone lines as needed without having to go through the expense of “hard wired” integration into our office phone system. A customer calls our Google Voice phone number and Google Voice is capable of ringing as many phone numbers as we program into this setup: so it can ring all of our land lines, cell phones, internet based phones and thus our customers can reach us even during the busiest times. We love adding customer convenience without taxing the customer with additional costs.

You can phone us at: (305) 745-2681 : Main Office Number (800) 761-XMAS : Toll Free number which rings our office lines, cell phones, etc… (305) 851-5679 : Google Voice number which rings our office lines, cell phones etc… which is usually programmed to ring our back up numbers when all traditional incoming lines get busy.customer-support-team on SKYPE international customers to reduce their costs to reach us as Skype to Skype calling is free.