This season can be rough as heck on us makers - between making handmade gifts, fulfilling holiday orders, and explaining to people that a custom-made item cannot be ready and shipped tomorrow, we're busyyyyy. I talked to makers and pulled from my own experience to put together some hot tips for not going absolutely bananas during this busy time:
Know your shipping deadlines (and make sure your customers know them too)
For the Americans out there, USPS has a handy chart of shipping deadlines that you can reference. Don't let these dates catch you off guard!
If you take orders online, make a similar chart of ordering deadlines for your own shop. If you have ready-made stock this might not look too different from the postal service chart, but if it takes you a month to make items to order your customers will appreciate the warning that they should place orders before November 18th. Also - make sure this chart is EVERYWHERE. Make it as hard to not see as possible and you'll spend less time answering messages asking if a custom item can be made and shipped in 3 days. That's time you could be crafting, or sleeping!
Limit your offerings
Whether you're selling your work or making personal gifts, keep the mental workload limited by not making too many different things you'll have to keep track of.
In a similar vein - whatever you think you can handle, take on like half of that. You're going to be much happier if it turns out you could have done more than if you're up all night on the 17th of December forcing yourself to finish one more thing (okay, that's an assumption, but I'd hazard it's true for most people)
Schedule a post-holiday vacation
One crafter - who is much stronger than me - mentioned their hyper aggressive approach to the holiday season:
I think I thrive on routine too much to enact this myself, but I see the benefits; capitalize on the holiday rush season, and then just chill. For people who work best in bursts, this might be the perfect approach to the holiday mayhem.
Order supplies early and in excess
Nothing kills the vibe like having a deadline and running short on the materials you needed, or having just enough and messing something up right at the end. This might sound shill-y coming from a craft supplies shop owner, but I mean: it's so much better to have too much than not enough in this case!
Of course, I highly recommend Lazy Lamb for our fast shipping and convenient bundles. Time is precious during this season- my goal is to speed up at least the materials shopping part of things so you have more time to actually create!
Close up shop
Shuttering for the season is also a valid strategy! When I asked about this on my socials, most of the responses involved some variation of "I stop taking orders" - some people close up earlier in the month than others, but most seem to agree that it's simply not worth the stress to be open through December.