Cataloger Spotlight: How My Twinn Uses Tiered Pricing to Encourage Early Holiday Doll Shoppers

My Twinn creates personalized, handcrafted dolls that lend themselves to gift-giving. So not surprisingly, the holiday season is its busiest and most lucrative time of the year. The company faces a time crunch, though, because its artisans use customer photos and information submitted by buyers to make doll heads that look like the little girls receiving them.

“We make [the doll heads] one at a time. They’re not pre-ordered or mass-produced,” ex-plains My Twinn Vice President Craig Currie.

So, it’s crucial for My Twinn to get the lion’s share of its holiday season orders early. To encourage customers to order earlier, it offers an incentive — a tiered pricing system that can save early birds up to $30.

Holiday 2006 was the first time My Twinn, a division of Denver-based eToys Direct, incorporated a tiered pricing discount, Currie says. For orders received between Sept. 1 and Oct. 6, the price of a 23-inch custom doll is $129 with delivery within four weeks. Those received by Nov. 6 are $139 and also get delivery within four weeks. For orders received by Nov. 24, customers pay $149 and are guaranteed delivery by Dec. 23. But for orders placed after Dec. 9, customers pay $159 with no guarantee of Christmas arrival.

Previously, My Twinn tried offering free shipping for orders placed by late September, as an incentive to get customers to order as early in the holiday season as possible. But Currie says the 2006 tiered pricing strategy was more successful.

26 Percent Pay-off

The move paid off. Holiday sales for 2006 jumped by 26 percent over holiday 2005.

Spokeswoman for eToys Direct, Sheliah Gilliland, says it’s difficult to measure how many more sales in 2006 could be attributed to the tiered pricing incentive, but both she and Currie believe the numbers are significant enough to try it again in 2007.