How Many Holiday Cards Should You Order?

Order what you need and not one card more. It sounds like discipline. On this particular purchase it is the most reliable way I know to overspend.

I am not going to argue that from sentiment. I am going to argue it from the price list, because the price list makes the case better than I can.

What a top-up actually costs

Here is the situation, and it happens every year. You order 250 cards. Somewhere around the 230th envelope you find the branch office, the two new hires, the referral partner nobody put on the spreadsheet. You are 100 short. So you reorder 100.

Run the two invoices side by side, at our Good tier, before any discount:

Shipping is $29.99 on the first order and $17.99 on the second. Total for 350 cards: $920.83, or $2.63 a card.

Now price 500 in one order: $1,091.35 plus $34.99 shipping, or $1,126.34 — $2.25 a card.

So 150 more cards cost you $205.51 more. Not double. Not half again. About 22% more money for 43% more cards, and every one of them personalized the same way, from the same run, on the same stock.

The number that should bother you

Look at it a second way, because this is the part people never see.

Those last 100 cards, bought on their own, cost $3.03 each once you count the second shipping charge.

The same cards, bought as part of a 500 order in the first place, cost $2.01 each.

You paid a 50% premium on the tail of your list. And you paid it for the privilege of ordering twice, waiting twice, and signing in two sittings two weeks apart.

Three ways the second run bites

The per-card price steps the wrong way. Our pricing has breaks at 100, 250, 500 and 1,000, and the whole structure rewards the single larger order. A 100-card run is priced as a 100-card run no matter how many you bought in September.

You pay shipping twice. It is not a large number on its own. It is a large number relative to what the extra cards were supposed to cost.

The discount may have moved. This is the one that actually hurts, and it is pure calendar. The early-order tier is 25% through October 15, then 20% through November 16, then 10% through December 11. Order 250 in the 25% window and top up 100 in the 10% window and you have paid $745.40 for 350 cards — cards discounted, shipping as charged. Ordering 500 up front inside that same 25% window would have been $853.50. You spent $108.10 less and you got 150 fewer cards, and you did it by being careful.

What ordering long actually costs you

Let me put the other side honestly, because "buy more" from a man who sells cards deserves suspicion.

If you order 500 and send 350, you have spent $1,126.34 instead of $617.64. That is real money out the door this year for 150 cards sitting in a box, and if you never use them it was a bad decision dressed up as a good one.

So the question is not "will I use them." It is "will I use them next year." And for most business lists the honest answer is yes, because next year's list is this year's list plus a few. A holiday card with your logo on it and no date printed anywhere is still a holiday card in twelve months. Spares cover the reorder, the second office, the client who moves, the envelope you ruin at eleven at night with a pen that skipped.

If your card carries a year, or a photograph of a team that will not be the same team, ignore all of this and order exactly what you need. Those cards do expire.

How to land on the right number

Three questions, and you will not need a spreadsheet.

Count the list properly before you price anything. Not your memory of the list. The actual export, deduplicated, with the households that get one card rather than two already merged. Almost nobody's memory of a list matches the export, and the memory is always the smaller number.

Add the people you always forget. Vendors. Your own staff. The referral partners. The prospect who did not buy. The attorney you send work to. That group is always larger than it feels, and it is the group that gets discovered in week two.

Then look at where the next price break sits. If the honest count is 430, look hard at 500. If it is 210, look hard at 250. The gap between your number and the break above it is almost always cheaper to buy now than to buy later, and you get spares out of it rather than a second invoice.

The exception, and it is a real one

None of this applies below our minimum of 25, and none of it applies if cash this quarter is the binding constraint. A smaller order sent on time beats a larger one you talked yourself out of. I would rather print 100 for you this year than nothing.

But if the only thing stopping you from ordering 500 is a feeling that 350 is the disciplined number — that feeling is costing you a dollar a card on the back end of your own list.

The short version

Count the list. Add the people you forget. Buy to the next break. The expensive mistake in this business is not ordering too many cards; it is discovering in mid-November that you are 40 short and finding out what 40 cards cost on their own.