Most of Patsy Cunningham’s customers are looking for a way to show appreciation to their customers.
Friday morning Ron Neblett, a financial advisor who recently moved to Northern Virginia, stopped into Cunningham’s gift basket shop, Basket Case on Old Forest Road, while visiting his parents in Lynchburg.
He was visiting was picking up a gift package he ordered for a client’s birthday gift. “It’s a lot more personal than just some Godiva chocolates,” Neblett said. “People are always delighted by it.”
These days, a lot of companies order smaller gift packages than they used to, but the orders still come. “I have found that corporates still say ‘thank you.’ It might be smaller, but they still do,” said Cunningham, the store’s owner.
Cunningham recently partnered with Maple Ridge Farms, a company that makes customized business gifts with corporate logos on them.
Before, Cunningham customized gift baskets by imprinting names on ribbons. That made it hard to customize large orders, and she couldn’t do logos, Cunningham said.
She learned about Maple Ridge Farms about two years ago but only became a distributor a few weeks ago. “This year, I decided that with the economy, maybe we could do more business without having to stock thousands of items,” she said.
Cunningham’s Web site, designergiftbaskets.com, now links to a Maple Ridge Farms catalog in addition to Basket Case’s online catalog.
Cunningham started Basket Case nearly 20 years ago as a way to earn some money while having the flexibility to spend time with her young daughters. After about three years the business overran their home so she moved it to a store on Lakeside Drive, and then to Old Forest Road.
Cunningham said that getting connections with local companies and colleges has been a big boon to Basket Case.
The colleges especially have been fruitful for her business. The parent section of Liberty University’s Web site links to Cunningham’s site. Also, she participates in a fundraiser with Lynchburg College selling care packages around exam time.
On Friday morning there were dozens of white boxes stacked against the wall in the store’s back room. Each one was filled with cookies, packs of nuts, ramen noodles and other must-haves for a college student crashing for exam.
“Some healthy, some not-so-healthy,” said Cunningham. About 150 to 200 of the boxes are due to be delivered to Lynchburg College today.
That’s another kind of customer Cunningham has learned she can count on.
“So many of the kids live so far from home, and their parents want them to have something special,” Cunningham said.
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