A Grand Plan in Action

Today, Creative Irish Gifts is a moderately sized catalog that stocks about 860 SKUs acquired from 181 vendors. It has a 12-month buyer file of roughly 150,000 names, and is growing with a projected $17 million in revenue this year, up $2 million from 2002.

In terms of efficiency and sophistication, however, it’s a world-class operation. For starters, the O’Connors are involved in a highly complex personnel juggling act, with a cadre of about 20 employees that balloons to 100 — a veritable army of part-timers — during the late fall and holiday season when they can expect about 60 percent of their annual revenue. Their large, spotlessly neat warehouse ships out anywhere from 350 orders a day in the summer to 3,500 a day in the high season.