Again - if you can't staff up and handle holidays you need to get another job - holidays are when we should shine (most customer exposure).
Just curious... How many of your designers are paid hourly?
If you are a shop where all or most of the designers are paid hourly, labor cost becomes more or less proportional to the number of orders you take.
A large florist is one such example. A shop run by a non-designer owner is another (like mine).
What this means is that, for these shops, there is a threshfold for the number of wire-ins they can take, beyond which they will not be able to sustain the business profittably. It's not that we can't find any temp staff. It's that doing so won't make any economic sense.
The only exception I can think of is if, only if, we can find inexpensive, yet very productive, temporary designers. But they simply don't exist. That's the reality.
In fact, I am intentionally trying to shift away from holiday sales, and instead focus on everyday business.
Am I correct in assuming that the main production designers in your shop are your family members? In that case, you are playing a different ball game, because the labor cost isn't proportional to the number of orders you take. In your case, the more orders you take, the more money you make. The same goes to the shops run by designer-owners.
