lulu & merie
I fell in love with these decorative playing cards. Available in three styles, each set comes with a notepad and pencil. It's a perfect hostess gift or stocking stuffer—these cards are so stylish your customers will want to leave them on display.

Epson
Epson launched their new, wide-format printer at the show (Stylus Pro 7880). It enables store owners to print 24" paper—perfect for selling customized gift wrap. The wholesale cost on the printer is $2995, and it's an easy and economical way to sell more personalized products.

Gauge
Gauge's whimsical yet elegant cake toppers are a special keepsake, personalized with the couple's first name. Simply display one in your store and Gauge will drop-ship the customized cake topper directly to your customer (or to your store for pick-up).

Wallies
These are practical and fun peel-and-stick chalkboard surfaces that are available in 21 styles. They also have two adorable children's murals. I love this product for the children's (or the home office) section of your store!

Notes & Queries
This leading distributor of design paper companies from Europe offers a beautiful line from Archivist, whose cards all feature pop-ups. The butterfly card's amazing detail caught my attention immediately.

Five more!

Kate Aspen
Adorable party favors that are all under $1.50 wholesale. The packaging is incredibly well done: a baby shower party favor includes an egg timer with a message that says, "About to Hatch;" and a bridal shower favor is a champagne bottle in a bucket with a message that says, "It's about time." If you have a wedding section, this is an adorable addition.

Anna Griffin
Anna Griffin launched beautiful, die-cut cards, wrapping paper, bags and luggage tags at the show. The patterns on the bags and luggage tags are inspired by their gorgeous paper, so be sure to check out all the new products on their website!

La Loupe
Pre-packaged set of 42 cards/44 envelopes for eight occasions, including birthday, thank you and blank. The outside box designs are very trendy and come in four styles. These are a great gift product to stock and would make a colorful store display. 

Sharmista Greetings
These beautiful cards are embroidered using a digitized machine and they are made of 100% recycled paper (cotton rag waste). Very unusual and beautiful cards.

Friendship Gift Bag
These clever gift bags were created for the purpose of re-gifting. The giver is encouraged to add artwork, then the recipient does the same and re-gifts, etc. All bags have a unique registration number and can then be tracked on their secure website. Currently, the bags are available in five styles.

NSS had lots of unusual products as well… here are five.

Karen Callen Designs
A very unique, super-soft hand-painted cork collection (that feels like leather) which includes wallet, planner, business card holder, contact lens holder and handbag. I love the artistic look.

Naos Graphics
A wonderful line of handmade pop-up greeting cards made in the US. (The owner has a degree in architecture which explains the high-end design.) It was hard to choose which card to feature because the entire line is worth checking out! Be sure to take a look at the accordion calendars on their website.

Pictura
A creative line of birthday cards from Pictura called "Vintage Year." The outside of the card features a bottle of wine and a choice of years (so the customer can choose the recipient's birth year). On the inside there is a section of the card called "From the Vine" that includes advice on wine; a second section, "In the Year," describes what happened in the news the year they were born. An adorable concept!

Divine Basics
This company has developed more than 250 flower pens that look (and some feel) amazingly real. In addition, they've launched four acid-free fragrances (spring bouquet, vanilla rain, ginger mist, and rich earth to spray on the flower pens and your stationery.

Up With Paper
Up With Paper has done it again—developed a gorgeous new twist on a pop-up product with their new gift embellishments called "The Finishing Touch." They have 12 designs in total (six are Christmas) and the detail and quality are fantastic. If you sell gift wrap, you must add this line to your store!

Stay tuned next week for more products from the show!

I've unpacked my bags from the show and now have hundreds of brochures spread out on the floor. My goal for after the show was to blog about five fabulous products per day, but to be honest, it's been incredibly hard to choose which products to talk about with so many great companies and concepts to feature!

But I'm sticking to my goal of only five per day, and these were my picks for today:

Alicia Klein
I instantly fell in love with Alicia Klein's new line of laptop bags called Safari. The bags are available in 12 styles and are made with real calf hair (due to the high quality, they won't shed). This bag is the essence of form meeting function and style! Klein also introduced a more traditional line of bags (Metropolis), which are very attractive, sleek black bags with patent trim available in innovative shapes. I think these bags will be a big seller during the holidays.

Smitten Kitten
Handmade in Canada, these funky notepads feature vintage wallpaper and are available in seven styles. All feature a built-in pencil holder. Tres chic!

Wine-O Cards
Clever cards that fit around the top of a wine bottle. Available in 41 styles, and printed on 100% recycled paper with soy based inks, these are the perfect gift tag for a wine bottle. Their tradeshow display quickly caught my attention, and you could easily re-create it in your store to sell the cards (even on a smaller scale the display would make an impact).

Chronicle Books
An amazing pop-up bird book that includes seven fantastically-detailed habitats. Each page has accompanying audio of bird songs to match the birds. This is a must-add book for your store—I think it will be a power seller this holiday season.

Gifts That Bloom
Create a garden when you blow bubbles with this clever two-in-one product. Dip the wand in the special bubble solution, blow and you'll be spreading a mixture of eight southwest wildflowers. The product is completely bio-degradeable and is a perfect addition to your garden section. 

Did you see any new products at the show that you loved? Let us know what you found! Reply here or share in the forum.

Stay tuned tomorrow for more products from NSS.

I just returned home from the NY Stationery Show sporting three bags full of fun new products and two aching feet (but it was worth it!). The show was very exciting, and the highlights for me were meeting new vendors and seeing new lines from the veterans.

Here are five fresh product picks of the day from the show:

Scentsational Greetings
Fun and creative greeting cards that utilize scents. The cards are available in six fragrances and 48 designs, like birthday cards scented with vanilla. Other fragrances include lemon, coffee, ocean and rose.

KatBlu
A beautiful and intricate line of lasercut wedding cards. (A cat is hidden in every design, adding a playful element.) Available in 8 designs.

BYO Bliss
Elegant scrapbook designed to capture your customers' favorite memories from their first ten years of marriage: the wedding, anniversaries, children, travel and home moves. Thought-provoking questions provide a great opportunity to capture details that will be interesting to reflect on in future years. As a dedicated scrapbooker, this is a must-have for my personal collection.

Volpino
Gorgeous Italian accessories made from acrylic and Swarovski crystals. The belts really "wowed" me.

Fancy That!
A very innovative product that will add pizzazz to any box—patterned shipping tape. I'm sure there are 100 other uses for this fun new product that comes in 10 patterns inspired from vintage fabrics and feed sacks. Their cute tag line says it all… "making functional fabulous."

Stay posted for more products from the show.

There has been an interesting dialog on the Retail Forum about charitable donations. As a retailer, you're in a position to get a lot of solicitations from local schools, hospitals and non-profits looking for products or gift certificates for fundraising events.

I have a personal philosophy that it's good karma to give. During the holidays, our company chooses a charity to support. Last year we sent more than $500 worth of supplies to the troops in Afghanistan, and for several years prior, we provided toys and clothes anonymously for a local family we found through a non-profit.

Many of the retailers expressed concern over just how many people were asking for donations. One retailer in particular offered some great advice on how to turn a charitable donation into an opportunity for your store. Instead of giving one $50 gift certificate, she specifies to the organization to auction/give away five $10 gift certificates to different people. She has found that by giving a lower denomination the gift certificate recipients often spend more than the face value of the certificate.

Even if the recipient chooses to just spend the $10, she said she's never upset because it's a chance to introduce a new customer to her store or reward an existing one.

While I usually like to blog about tips and advice, I couldn't resist talking about an amazing opportunity that we have for one lucky gift store owner. Last year we completed our first-ever ultimate makeover, and it was such a huge success that we decided to make it an annual contest.

But the deadline is just around the corner! You MUST have your entries in by June 1.

Enter now, the process is easy.

The winner will receive a makeover from GIFT SHOP's visual merchandising guru, Donna Kent, and the store's before and after photos will be published in the fall issue of GIFT SHOP magazine, plus, we have a website dedicated to the contest: GIFTSHOPMakeover.com. If you win, it's a great opportunity to earn some local publicity, AND you can use the fabulous new look to invite all your existing customers in to see the changes.

From left, the makeover team
Patricia Norins, Publisher and CEO of GIFT SHOP,
Donna Trottier, winner/owner of Blue Hydrangea and Donna Kent, visual merchandiser.

I'm in the middle of a consulting project for a retailer who brought me on board to help them figure out how to increase sales and profitability. Right now we're looking at the strength of their sales team, as that tends to be one area retailers overlook.

If you have a large team, or just a few employees, you could be missing out on sales. A team is great, but not if it's filled with mediocre employees.

I know firsthand as a business owner how difficult it can be to find even mediocre employees, so the last thing you want to do is fire someone who's doing OK. But while my old mentality was that it's expensive to find new employees and train them (and who knows if a new employee would do better than the old one), my new one mentality is the opposite.

Three years ago I decided we needed a change in one department because the sales had only modest growth and I thought we could be doing much better. I fired the employee, and in only a month, the sales had tripled. And this growth trend has continued for the past three years. If I had kept that employee on, it would have cost me as much as $500,000.

What are your mediocre employees costing you?  If for example, a mediocre employee sells $250 a day and a fantastic employee sells $750, you'd be losing $184,750 a year.

I used to feel guilty about the time it takes to hire the right people. I was concerned that I was spending a lot of time on hiring when I could be focusing on other aspects of running my business.

Now I know it's worth the time to find the best people.

Hire the best-of-the-best employees and you'll get the best-of-the-best results!