So you want to rent Christmas Trees...
We regularly get questions from people interested in starting a Christmas Tree rental service in their local area. Since we usually don’t have time to answer each one individually, especially during the Holidays, we’ve composed page with some basic information and advice that may be helpful.
Know Your Trees
The most important piece of advice we can give is to know what trees do well naturally in your area. These will generally be the easiest to grow and maintain outdoors during the year, and should do better with less attention than varieties that are not well adapted to your local climate. Here on the Central Coast of California, the California Redwood does very well, and we can grow them ourselves them from cuttings. The Douglas and Nordmann Fir varieties we offer are purchased from growers in Washington and Oregon at higher cost, and it can be difficult to maintain them in good condition year after year.
Know your Climate
We’re fortunate to have a mild climate; it does not freeze in the winter, and outdoor temperatures rarely exceed 45 – 75°F (7 – 24°C) the whole year, so the trees don’t get too much of a shock when they go inside for a month in the middle of winter. Freezing outdoor temperatures will be the biggest concern for many interested in the business. Trees in cold climates go dormant during the winter, and bringing them inside will “wake” them up, as if it was spring. Following this by returning them to a freezing outdoor environment after Christmas would be very stressful. We know of no companies offering this service in areas where it freezes during the winter.
Manage your Inventory
One of the most requested services we offer to customers is the ability to request the same tree back, year after year. This requires some careful tracking of each tree. To manage this, we assign each tree two numbers: A “tree number” that will always stay with the tree, and a “location number” that identifies the location of a tree in a given season (this number changes every year).
For the tree number, we use the format TYNNN, where T is literally the letter ‘T’, Y is last digit of the year the tree was acquired, and NNN is a 3-digit serial number for the tree obtained in that year. We may skip numbers to help identify batches or growers. So, for example, tree number T3042 is the 42nd tree acquired in 2023, and we know that numbers 000 through 199 are reserved for trees we grow ourselves (in this case, they are assigned numbers the first year they’re large enough to potentially be rented).
For the location number, we use the format Y-FR-NN, where Y is the last digit of the current year, F is the field, R is the row number in that field, and NN is the position in the row. So, tree 4-23-42 is the 42nd tree in the 3rd row of our ‘B’ field (0 or 1 are ‘A’ field, ‘2’ is B field, ‘3’ is C field, etc) for the 2024 season. This allows us to immediately know exactly where a tree is just by looking at the number. The year is included so that we can easily recognize an old location number if it turns up on a label that wasn’t updated, etc. We primarily use location numbers for identifying the tree on orders, etc, but we have a database that cross-references the location with the tree number, so we know where a tree was each season.
These numbers are laser-printed on waterproof labels and applied to pots early in the season, and the label (should) stay on the pot until the tree is returned from the customer. They’re placed back in the fields at essentially random locations, depending when they arrive. After all the trees are back, we scan each label (there’s a barcode on the label that encodes the tree number) and generate location numbers and labels for the next season. This requires some diligence to track – especially when customers remove the labels or trees are re-poted – and we’re looking for alternative ways to track the trees. We’ve experimented with RFID tags, and that might be the way to go.
There’s a lot more to it, of course, and we use some custom-built software on our website (we run on the Woo Commerce shopping platform) to allow customers to order specific trees and keep track of each one, as well as manage our delivery and pickup routes. For companies needing a system like ours, we can provide this software and assistance on a consulting basis.
This page is a work in progress. If you have questions, feel free to contact us and we will try to answer them as we can, but please don’t expect a quick response during the Christmas season.