How Edible Arrangements makes the most out of Valentine’s Day

If you did your Valentine’s Day shopping last minute, worry not—you aren’t alone. Walmart says 75% of its Valentine’s Day sales occur on February 13 and 14.

Edible Brands, which houses holiday gifting powerhouse Edible Arrangements, is well aware of this trend. CEO Somia Farid Silber spoke with Revenue Brew about how the company makes the most of Valentine’s demand and how revenue strategy is built around holiday spikes.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I imagine Valentine’s Day accounts for a sizable spike in demand. How do you prepare for that?

Our delivery volume increases by about 13x for Valentine’s week, which makes it the most demanding fulfillment day of the year. For us, it’s really important that we own the customer experience end to end. Over 75% of our deliveries are delivered through our first-party network from our retail locations. So we do rely a little bit on third parties, but it is mostly us—going back to this idea of making sure that we are controlling the end experience.

How important is just Valentine’s Day to the revenue strategy for Edible Arrangements?

Valentine’s Day makes up about 15% of our revenue. Then once you look at the first half of the year, it’s over 50% of our revenue between holidays like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, [and] Easter. So [it’s] very important that we execute on the holiday flawlessly because it helps us a lot from a profitability perspective as we get into the slower summer months.

What goes into planning for that spike in demand?

Typically, we start planning for Valentine’s Day a year ahead and it usually starts with: “What are the products that we want to sell?” and “What is going to be relevant to customers for next Valentine’s Day?” So we look at trends [and] we come up with the product lineup. Once we have the product lineup, we look at the recipes, the containers, the packaging.

How do you use data to pinpoint potential trends?

It can be hard to estimate trends that early, but there’s usually indications on what we know will sell. For example, this year we’re selling a heart-shaped cheesecake with a chocolate swirl. We sold it last year as well, and it did fantastic. So, less so focused on trends from a product perspective, more so in how we talk about it. If you go to our Instagram or our TikTok, you’ll see a lot of really fun, relevant content around Valentine’s Day.

How do you build room for product experimentation that can break through?

It’s all data, it’s math. You can never get it 100% right.

If we’re launching something that's very new and fun, we will be a little more conservative with our forecasting just to see how it does.

Last holiday season we launched a red velvet cake. We only ordered a few units per store, and we sold out very quickly. So we knew for future holidays, this performed really well, so let’s increase our inventory for this product.

How have changes in consumer behavior in the delivery space changed how Edible Arrangements operates?

We think about our promotion strategy in a unique way. Our customers who shop with us earlier get rewarded with promotions and even free delivery. But if you’re coming last minute, if capacity is starting to get tight, we’re able to adjust delivery fees to ensure that we can hire the appropriate drivers to help us with that.

Do you think about extending ordering windows in order to help ease potential bottlenecks around holidays?

The No. 1 tool that we have for that is typically delivery fees, so that’s one way, and promotions, that’s usually how we encourage ordering ahead. Over the last couple of years, we have seen our customers get more and more last minute, and I think a lot of that is just driven by the fact that same-day delivery and last mile is something that’s no longer a competitive advantage, but it’s an expectation that our customers have.