How To Start a Gift Basket Service

Turn your ingenuity into cash by creating lavish gift baskets for business and individual customers. Entrepreneur Magazine's start-up guide can help you.

Custom gift baskets could be your dream business. If you're creative and have the knack for making gift baskets, you could make $50,000 or more a year - part-time out of your home. Our guide will show you how to put your creative talent to work generating cash.

Start-up is easy. There are few equipment requirements and no need for a retail store, so starting it from home, full or part time, is ideal And you can set your own hours and workload.

Your revenue will be limited only by how hard you want to work and how much you want your business to grow. You can easily gross $10,000 or more annually working part time from home, or $1 million and up operating a retail store or mail order business full time.

Fifteen years ago, Sue C., a gift basket maker in Salt Lake City, Utah, found herself out of a job when the company she’d been working for closed its doors. Her search for a job with a retail florist was futile because prospective employers felt she was overqualified. So with her final paycheck of $300, she started her own gift basket business in her home. “I knew what I wanted to do, so I wrote a business plan, got all the proper licensing, bought some stationery, and joined the chamber of commerce,” Sue recalls. “My first order was for a $35 gift basket, and I had to wait until that money came in to buy products for the next basket.” She’s outgrown her home space and now operates from a warehouse.

Christine M. was an executive with a cosmetics company who enjoyed creating baskets as gifts for her friends. She was also totally unimpressed with the commercial baskets available in upscale department stores and amazed at how popular they were. “I used to sit in a department store and watch people flock over to these things that looked horrendous, but they loved them,” Christine says. “I thought that if they were going crazy over that, imagine what they would do with something that was put together nicely.” And that’s what convinced her that a gift basket business would work, so she founded a profitable homebased gift basket business.

Chris K. got the idea to start her own homebased gift basket business after her mother-in-law passed away. The family received a number of gift baskets containing food—but so much of it was perishable that it ended up spoiling and being thrown out. “My cousin and I were talking about this, and she said there should be something in the baskets to keep long term. So we got the idea that if we put in gifts—real, true gifts, not just food and perishable items—the basket would be more memorable for both the recipient and the giver,” Chris says. It didn’t take long for the two cousins to establish a formal partnership, develop a business plan and get their business up and running. How long will it take you? That depends, of course, on your own circumstances. There’s no serious rush—this is an industry in its infancy, thriving but with a huge potential market still untapped. So settle down for some reading that we hope you’ll find both informative and entertaining—and that will catapult you into the exciting, profitable and fun world of gift baskets.

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