At Hand & Stone Massage and Facial Spa, we offer a diversified revenue model with a wide range of services and retail products, from Swedish massages to scented candles. We also have a strong national gift card program that offers additional revenue to our franchise locations. Traditionally, companies offer five major gift card holidays, including Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Black Friday, and the December Holiday season. In 2016, Hand & Stone decided to implement a new gift card holiday: Christmas in July.
After meeting with some franchisees, Chief Marketing Officer Jack Bachinsky realized there was a need to consistently increase revenue during the summer months. “We received feedback that some of our locations were celebrating Christmas in July at the spa level. We loved that concept and it inspired us to create our national promotion across all franchises. Christmas in July is not only a fun invented holiday, but it fills the gap between Father’s Day and Black Friday – giving our spas an additional source of gift card revenue,” Bachinsky said.
Gift Cards not only bring additional revenue to franchisees, but they also allow new customers redeeming those gift cards to experience Hand & Stone for themselves and discover the value of the monthly Lifestyle membership.
We know that savvy consumers shop at all times of the year for gift card value so we identified the opportunity that a 3rd quarter gift card sale could bring to the spas if we aggressively priced the gift cards for those savvy shoppers.
Now an annual event, Christmas in July offers our lowest priced gift card of the year and is the 3rd most popular gift card season for Hand & Stone. The invented holiday provides an additional stream of revenue during the summer months and continues to increase in popularity year over year. We just wrapped up this year’s Christmas in July deal and can safely say it was a huge success. In fact, the only downside is that we have to take our tinsel and trees down just to put them back up in five months!
