Harold Smith, Susan Hawn-Smith At Their Stores, It’s Christmas All Year Long

It takes four large bales of hay and a thick bed of straw to build the backdrop for the Nativity scene at The Incredible Christmas Store in Sandpoint.

Anything less would be dwarfed by the almost life-sized statues gathered around the manger in the window display.

Inside the store, four chest-high likenesses of Father Christmas stand like a bewhiskered honor guard around a decorated tree that vaults toward the ceiling in a shimmering celebration of the holidays.

An arpeggio-intensive piano rendition of “Do You Hear What I Hear?” drifts among the aisles with shelves of snow globes, Santa Clauses, angels, ornaments and Christmas collectibles.

Yuletide lasts all year at this 3,500-square-foot Sandpoint business. And it’s just as ubiquitous at the 1,800-square-foot sister store about two miles north in Ponderay.

Husband-and-wife owners Harold Smith and Susan Hawn-Smith get two Christmas rushes every 12 months, giving them plenty of business for both locations.

“Our sales peak in August during the tourist season and then climb back up again in December,” Harold said. “So we enjoy two peak times of the year.”

The Incredible Christmas Store had its genesis as a 600-square-foot afterthought in the Hawn-Smith Glass Studios in Ponderay. Since that shop opened in June 1990, Christmas has taken over, doubling sales for the first three years and bursting at the seams every year thereafter until the owners were forced to lease a downtown space next door to the Coldwater Creek bridge mall in 1996.

The two, heavily stocked stores bear little resemblance to the first site.

“My dad has been taking pictures of our store since we opened,” Susan said. “In those first photos, the walls looked so empty that I can’t believe people said they liked it and kept coming back.”

But they have come back - in droves. Tourists make annual pilgrimages to The Incredible Christmas Store, taking part in a national buying trend at similar businesses around the country. Many of them travel to the world’s largest yearround Christmas store, Bronner’s, a 75,000-square-foot Michigan outlet that orders holiday lights by the boxcar load.

“That touring trend is still there and it’s growing,” Harold said. “We talk to a lot of people who schedule their vacations around going to Christmas stores.”

Year-round holiday sales and competition from imported glass ornaments are pushing the couple out of the glass studio, which employed 10 glass-blowers in its heyday four years ago.

The glass hummingbirds Harold Smith first sold from behind his blower’s torch at flea markets turned into a 100,000 unit per year mail-order hit. But, due to competition from offshore producers, that side of the business will be discontinued at the end of this month.

“We did hummingbirds for 10 years,” Susan said.

“And we only anticipated getting a couple of years out of it,” Harold added. “The imports saturated the market. We’ve had Korea, Taiwan and Mexico competing with us.”

Lessons learned from mail-order hummingbird sales, however, should come in handy in the next stage of growth at The Incredible Christmas Store. By signing up customers as they pass through the Sandpoint and Ponderay stores, the owners have compiled a mailing list of 7,000 names. Unlike shotgun mailings that bring scattershot results, these catalogs go out to pre-qualified customers who have visited the stores in person.

“We’re not shooting from the hip,” Harold said.

Mail-order now represents 15 percent of overall sales. The Smiths think they can realize “phenomenal growth” by prioritizing their mail-order division.

“We’ve only been following it instead of leading it,” said Susan, adding that a new “auto-ship” system for collectors’ items like Christmas village pieces has shown how far a small amount of attention goes toward increasing catalog sales.

For customers who request the service, The Incredible Christmas Store automatically sends the latest addition to a specified line of collectible merchandise.

“It’s good for us and it’s good for the collector, because so many people want to own everything in a particular line,” Susan said.

Being surrounded by never-ending Christmas hasn’t turned the owners or their 10 employees into humbugs. Then again, they don’t go out of their way to find holiday cheer when a quiet midwinter evening out will suffice.

“We took our employees to Christmas dinner the other night and everybody at the restaurant knocked themselves out trying to find some Christmas music for us,” Harold said. “We all had a good laugh.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo