If you're a retailer buying holiday décor—Kurt Adler glass Christmas ornaments, fairy ornaments, snow globes, candles—you've probably asked yourself: what should I stock? There's no one answer that works for every store. A 400-square-foot boutique needs a different assortment than a regional chain, and an online store has to think about shipping damage in ways a brick-and-mortar shop never will.
I've been a procurement manager for a mid-sized gift retailer for about six years. We spend roughly $30,000 a year on holiday inventory, which adds up to around $180,000 over time. I've tracked every purchase order in our system, dealt with breakage, returns, and last-minute stock-outs. So I'll walk you through how I think about building a holiday product mix—and how you can apply the same logic to your store—without pretending I have a magic formula.
Quick note on pricing: all the dollar figures I mention below come from our purchase orders and the distributor catalogs I reviewed in Q4 2024 for our 2025 planning. Your numbers may differ, especially if you're buying outside the US or ordering smaller volumes.
Three Scenarios, Three Different Product Mixes
Basically, your ideal assortment comes down to three questions: Who is your customer? How much space do you have? And are you selling from a physical store, online, or both?
Here are the three scenarios I see most often in gift and home décor retail.
Scenario 1: The Curated Boutique
If you're a small shop with a focused brand, you want items that customers can't find at Target or on Amazon. That's where Kurt Adler glass Christmas ornaments shine. Especially the older-style hand-painted ones and the fairy ornaments. They're not cheap, but they anchor a display and give customers a reason to linger.
One thing that surprises a lot of buyers: Kurt Adler, despite the German-sounding name, is actually a New York-based company founded in the 1940s. That's why you see a wide range of styles, from traditional European glass to more playful fairy designs. It also means some lines come from overseas suppliers and have longer lead times than you'd expect. If you're planning a themed window display around a specific fairy collection, order early.
From a cost perspective, the margin is decent—usually 50% or more if you're buying wholesale at the right tier. But the real profit comes from the collectible dynamic. A customer who buys one fairy ornament this year is likely to come back next year for the matching one. I've seen this repeat-purchase behavior drive January sales when everything else is dead.
Shopping tip: Don't buy the entire collection at once. Pick a few themes—classic Santa, Victorian, fairy—and test them in small quantities. Once you see which ones move, place a second, larger order. That sounds like common sense, but from 2022 to 2023, our first holiday season, I ordered a full display set of 120 ornaments because I trusted the catalogue photos. The breakage rate on the way to the store was negligible, but the ones that didn't sell we could only clear at 30% off. A lot of dead capital.
Scenario 2: High-Volume Retail (Department Stores and Large Gift Shops)
Bigger stores need a pipeline of products, not just a point of difference. Here, the focus shifts to volume pricing, dependable restocking, and broad appeal. You'll still carry Kurt Adler, but you'll lean more on the mid-price lines—glass ornaments in the $8–$14 wholesale range, traditional snow globes, and seasonal figurines that look good under a tree.
In this scenario, candles become a critical pillar. And that's where the whole "votive vs. tea candle" decision actually matters.
Votive vs. Tea Candle: What a Buyer Actually Cares About
Tea lights are the impulse-buy workhorse. They're cheap—$0.10–$0.30 per candle wholesale—and they sell themselves. A customer might grab a pack on the way to the register. You'll see a ton of units, but the per-unit profit is thin.
Votive candles are taller, usually about 1.5"x1.5", and they're meant to be burned in a holder. Wholesale price is around $0.60–$1.20 each, depending on wax and fragrance. But here's the thing: they don't burn any longer than tea lights? Wait, no—votives burn 10-20 hours, tea lights only 3-5 hours. That's a huge difference. So customers who buy votives also buy holders, and holders have margins anywhere from 100% to 300%.
People think the profit in candles comes from the candles themselves. Actually, the candles are just the bait. The real money is in holders and the repeat purchase. So from a total-profit perspective, votives win—if you have the shelf space and the customers who are into tabletop décor. From a cost-to-carry perspective, tea lights are easier: smaller, no breakage, long shelf life. My rule: in a high-volume store, carry tea lights for impulse and votives for deliberate purchases. You need both, but the ratio depends on your customer. If your store is near a residential area, votives and holders sell well through the holiday season, especially in neutral colors. If you're in a tourist spot, tea lights are the safer bet.
Scenario 3: The Online Retailer
E-commerce changes the game completely. Your biggest cost isn't the product—it's the logistics chain between the warehouse and the customer. And that's where glass ornaments and snow globes get scary.
Kurt Adler glass Christmas ornaments are beautiful, but if you ship them in standard cardboard boxes with basic bubble wrap, you're going to lose money to breakage. Trust me, I've been there. The most frustrating part of ordering glass ornaments is the breakage rate. You'd think the packaging would be enough, but it's not. Last holiday season, we had a breakage rate of 11% on a shipment of 700 glass ornaments. That ate away the entire margin on the order.
Snow globes are even worse. They're heavy, fragile, and the liquid inside can freeze or leak in transit. We tried offering three different Kurt Adler snow globes on our e-commerce site in 2024—the 4-inch mini ones that seemed safe enough. After the first 20 orders, we had two blown gaskets and one cracked globe. That's a 15% failure rate. For us, the numbers didn't work. We pulled snow globes from online-only listings and now they're part of our store-only catalog.
What works online? Smaller, lighter ornaments made of shatterproof materials, and candles—especially tea lights and travel-size votives. They're practically unbreakable, and shipping costs are predictable. If you do want to sell glass ornaments online, you have two options: add a sustainable packaging fee to your shipping calculation, or switch to a fulfillment house that specializes in fragile goods. We went with the second option, but we had to accept a higher cost per order.
How to Figure Out Which Scenario You're In
Here are the questions I use when we're planning a new season. Be honest with yourself—the answer isn't about what you want to sell, it's about what your business model can support.
- What's your average order value? If you're over $50 per transaction, you can justify dedicated shelf space to premium figures. If you're under $25, you need more impulse items and lower price points.
- Are your customers buying a gift or a decoration for themselves? Gift buyers are less price-sensitive but return items more often. Decoration buyers care about quality and often buy multiple items in one visit.
- How much storage do you have? Glass items need stable, climate-controlled storage. Snow globes especially can't sit in a hot warehouse for months.
- What happens if a product breaks in the store or in transit? If you don't have a generous budget for shrink, you'll need to keep the fragile stuff limited to a small display.
That last question is the reason why I always say prevention is cheaper than cure. An extra $50 in bubble wrap and a 15-minute check of every box before dispatch saves hundreds of dollars in replacements. I created a 12-item checklist for our warehouse team after a particularly painful January return batch. The checklist itself took an afternoon to build and it's saved us an estimated $8,000 in potential rework since then. Not because the team is careless—they're great—but because we hadn't thought through every single failure mode.
The Hidden Costs Nobody Talks About
In my experience, the price you see on a supplier's wholesale price list is maybe 70% of the actual cost of carrying a product. You have to add freight, customs (if importing), shrink, and storage. When I'm comparing quotes, I build a simple spreadsheet with all these variables. It changed the way I buy.
A few examples from my own records:
Kurt Adler glass ornaments: list price $12 each. By the time we add freight, packing, and damage, the landed cost is about $16. We sell at $24.99, so the margin is thin—but it's acceptable because repeat purchases from collectors boost January sales.
Snow globes: list price $18. Add $3 for shipping, $2 for potential damage, and another $1.50 for the extra packaging material. You're at $24.50, needing to sell at $34.99 to make a reasonable margin. It can work in a physical store, but online it just doesn't hold up.
Votive candles: list price $0.80. Freight adds $0.05. They don't break. Storage is compact. You can retail at $4.99 and feel great about the margin, especially when you bundle two with a holder at $12.99. That's a 70% margin on a bundled sale.
That covers the numbers side. But there's also the "prevention over cure" angle. I always request a sample shipment before we commit to a large order. For candles, that means checking for frost or sweating in warm weather. For glass ornaments, it means dropping a boxed item from waist height to see if the padding holds. For snow globes, it means shaking them hard and leaving them on a shelf for 48 hours to see if any fluid leaks. That 48-hour test saved us from a bad batch two years ago. We caught a leaking glue joint on a sample that would have ruined a $3,000 order.
Final Thoughts
The holiday product mix that works for your store is the one that lets you sleep in January. I know that sounds like a joke, but it's not. If you choose products that match your customers' habits, your storage capacity, and your tolerance for risk, you'll have fewer headaches after the season ends.
Don't just order what the big catalogues show on the cover. Run the numbers, test the fragile items carefully, and always think in terms of total cost, not unit price.
Kurt Adler has some lovely pieces, and a well-chosen assortment of glass ornaments, fairy figurines, and snow globes can make your holiday displays memorable. Just spend the same amount of time choosing what goes *around* those pieces—packaging, placement, backup stock—and you'll be fine.
My experience is based on about 200 mid-range orders over six years. If you're dealing with luxury high-end or ultra-budget segments, your numbers will look different. But the process—evaluate all costs, test before you commit, and adjust based on your own scenario—should still hold up.