https://christmastree4me.com/blogs/default-blog.atomChristmas Tree For Me - Default Blog2020-11-19T05:11:41-05:00Christmas Tree For Mehttps://christmastree4me.com/blogs/default-blog/cbs-news-shoppers-scrambling-during-shortened-holiday-season2020-11-19T05:11:41-05:002021-08-28T08:08:54-04:00CBS News - Shoppers Scrambling During Shortened Holiday Seasonadmin https://boston.cbslocal.com/2019/12/12/short-holiday-season-shoppers-scrambling-christmas/
By Juli McDonaldDecember 12, 2019 at 11:00 pm
Because Thanksgiving fell on the latest possible date it could be, this year is the shortest time frame between Black Friday and Christmas since 2013. There are six fewer days than last year.
With mail piles mounting for the North Pole, the postal service is in overdrive. They expect their busiest mail day to be Monday, December 16th. At the mall, they’re adding hours to accommodate crowds who prefer stores over online shopping.
“(Shoppers) want to make sure they’re making the right purchase. They want to be able to see it, feel it, touch it,” said Adrienne Hood, who manages the Shops at Chestnut Hill.
There just aren’t enough weekends to fit all the traditions in, leading some to outsource.
‘Christmas Tree for Me’ has already delivered 400 trees to Boston-area homes. Customers can order online, or if they’re lucky, they might find a pop-up in their building lobby!
“They walk in the building, pick out a tree. One of our guys will put a fresh cut on the tree, carry it up to their unit. Install it,” Jeff Feccia explained. The business even offers tree stands, lights, decorations, and removal!
(WBZ-TV)
“It’s a nice evening because we can go upstairs and decorate the tree and it wasn’t a whole production. We can do it in the middle of the week which is great when you have hectic schedules,” one customer said.
The good news? Even though the days are winding down ’til Christmas – there’s still time to make the nice list.
“We need more light in the world today. Smiling is very contagious. If you smile, you make somebody else smile and it goes forward. If everyone smiles, it makes the world brighter,” Santa Claus said.
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https://christmastree4me.com/blogs/default-blog/magic-106-7fm-picking-a-christmas-tree-online-this-new-service-makes-the-task-a-lot-easier2019-09-10T00:49:00-04:002021-08-31T07:57:30-04:00MAGIC 106.7FM - Picking a Christmas Tree... Online?! This new service makes the task a lot easieradmin December 17, 2018
This time of year, you could walk through a farm’s rows of trees, searching for your perfect Fraser fir as holiday songs blast and bundled-up families peruse nearby. Or you could let a Boston-based company do all of the leg work for you.
Christmas Tree for Me, owned by engaged couple Jeff Feccia and Bridget Kinney, aims to simplify the way people shop for trees. Customers order their trees online, and the company delivers them and sets them up. It also hosts Christmas tree pop-up shops in residential building lobbies across Boston. Homemade wreaths, made by Kinney, and tree accessories such as lights and stands, are available for sale online and at the pop-up shops as well. Christmas Tree for Me trees, which come from Canada this year, cost $74 to $239, depending on size and type. Delivery is included in that cost for city customers, while those who live more than three miles outside of the city pay a $3-per-mile delivery fee.
The price of the trees also includes set up and clean up — both pre- AND post-Christmas. The company returns after the holidays to haul the trees away and recycle them. For more info you can check out -- christmastree4me.com.
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https://christmastree4me.com/blogs/default-blog/caught-in-southie-it-s-time-to-deck-the-halls-christmas-tree-for-me2019-09-10T00:38:49-04:002021-08-31T07:55:03-04:00CAUGHT IN SOUTHIE - It’s time to deck the halls: Christmas Tree For Me!admin By Maureen Dahill
Christmas Tree For Me might be the best new thing! When it comes to home delivery, you’ve heard of door dash and drizly, right? Well, this new service lets you have a beautiful Christmas tree delivered right to your door without ever having to leave the comfort and warmth of your home!
Jeff Feccia and Bridget Kinney have revolutionized the Christmas tree buying experience by starting Christmas Tree For Me! It’s their mission to provide the ultimate Christmas convenience, which consists of prompt tree delivery, setup, and removal; all with just the click of a mouse. You simply select one online and they’ll deliver it to you!
Jeff and Bridget realize that some people love the idea of going out to tree farm and picking their own but they also understand this is not always achievable for all. No car? No time? No babysitter? Physically unable to tie a tree to the roof of your car and setup it up at home? Don’t want to scratch your car’s roof? No worries – leave it to Christmas Tree For Me!
Another bonus of Christmas Tree For Me is they recycle the trees back into the earth once Christmas ends. Once removed from your home, they store your tree until spring arrives. Your tree is then recycled into mulch and spread in playgrounds, walking trails, and gardens throughout Boston for all to enjoy.
In addition to beautiful high quality trees, Christmas Tree For Me offers hand-decorated wreaths, tree stands, tabletop trees, lights, & needle loss preventatives.
They will also be hosting some Christmas Tree Pop Up Shops around the city if you want to check out the merchandise in person! For more information visit here!
Make sure to follow them on Instagram!
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https://christmastree4me.com/blogs/default-blog/boston-com-this-boston-company-has-christmas-tree-pop-up-shops-and-online-ordering-and-they-ll2019-09-10T00:24:09-04:002021-08-31T07:54:35-04:00Boston.com - This Boston company has Christmas tree pop-up shops and online ordering. And they’ll...admin By Kristi Palma
December 7, 2018
This time of year, you could walk through a farm’s rows of trees, searching for your perfect Fraser fir as holiday songs blast and bundled-up families peruse nearby. Or you could let a Boston-based company do all of the leg work for you.
Christmas Tree for Me, owned by engaged couple Jeff Feccia and Bridget Kinney, aims to simplify the way people shop for trees. Customers order their trees online, and the company delivers them and sets them up. It also hosts Christmas tree pop-up shops in residential building lobbies across Boston. Homemade wreaths, made by Kinney, and tree accessories such as lights and stands, are available for sale online and at the pop-up shops as well.
Feccia said, based on sales so far, he expects to sell 300 Christmas trees this holiday season, up from 50 last year.
“Literally, convenience, convenience, convenience,” he said of why he thinks his company is growing. “That’s what everyone is about today. People are so busy today.”
Christmas Tree for Me trees, which come from Canada this year, cost $74 to $239, depending on size and type. Delivery is included in that cost for city customers, while those who live more than three miles outside of the city pay a $3-per-mile delivery fee.
The price of the trees also includes set up and clean up — both pre- and post-Christmas. The company returns after the holidays to haul the trees away and recycle them.
“Every time I install a tree, I’m literally on my hands and knees in someone’s house sweeping up needles,” Feccia said. “That’s a convenience factor, and people are willing to pay for that.”
During the Christmas tree pop-up events, Feccia takes 20 to 30 variously sized trees to a Boston residential building’s lobby. The management teams at some buildings up the festive factor by adding live music, wine and appetizers, and sometimes even a hot cocoa bar, Feccia said. Christmas Tree for Me will host five more pop-ups in December, at spots like The Kensington in downtown Boston and Ink Block in the South End.
Picture this, said Feccia: “You walk home from work, you open the door [to your building], Christmas music is playing, you smell the aroma of fresh Christmas pine, you see neighbors, and you literally just come up to us and say, ‘OK, I’ll take this tree, this stand, two boxes of lights, a thing of fertilizer, and I live in unit 100.'”
Feccia said his team then can set up a tree inside a residence in as little as 10 minutes.
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https://christmastree4me.com/blogs/default-blog/the-boston-globe-that-perfect-tree-is-just-a-few-clicks-away2019-09-06T02:10:27-04:002021-08-31T07:54:08-04:00THE BOSTON GLOBE - That perfect tree is just a few clicks awayadmin By Janelle Nanos Globe Staff,December 15, 2018, 7:14 p.m.
Three years ago, Jeff Feccia and his girlfriend, Bridget Kinney, had just purchased a Christmas tree at a lot in Brighton and tossed it in Feccia’s pickup when they saw another customer wrestling a tree onto an Uber. Feccia, who’d worked at a Christmas tree farm as a teen, laughed out loud at the absurdity.
Then he realized he’d found a business opportunity.
So last year they launched Christmas Tree 4 Me, a mobile-friendly website that lets customers shop for a tree of their size and liking, and this season expect to deliver more than 300 holiday evergreens around the Boston area.
A cool $200 buys the full white-glove service: the tree, lights, and a stand — all set up. For an additional fee, they’ll take it away after the presents are unwrapped, leaving nary a needle behind.
“Basically, the client doesn’t even have to touch the tree,” said Feccia, who works in finance in downtown Boston when he’s not hawking trees. “The only thing you have to touch is your cellphone.”
Count the annual Christmas tree trade as yet another niche corner of retail transformed by online ordering and Internet-enabled strategies, making it easier for growers and middlemen to sell trees and for buyers to get the tree they want — fast.
A high-tech Tannenbaum isn’t for everyone, particularly those looking for Instagram-ready snaps of bucolic tree farms with the little ones. No, this is for the harried and the practical— often parents, often urbanites — who can’t be bothered with slogging out to the tree lot, and wrestling the tree atop the car and then into the house, where the dreaded tree stand awaits.
“With all the technological advantages today, why wouldn’t you get your tree delivered to you?” said Azuraye Wycoff, whose moving company, Small Haul, works with nurseries around Boston to deliver trees to online buyers. The cost is $150 to $175 for delivery and setup, another $20 to $40 for a stand.
They say the convenience of having a tree delivered — no needles in your car or sap on your hands — is worth it, considering a typical tree around town goes for about $60 to $80.
She argues tree shopping can be more stressful than magical if you’re just picking one out in a parking lot. Having a tree delivered makes it an event and part of the fun of the season.
“For us it’s about making it special,” she said. “Growing up, we always picked out the tree and it was a big event in my family. We wanted to replicate that without the hassle.”
And for tree sellers, the online sales channel is a powerful weapon against their ultimate nemesis: the fake tree.
“The competition is the artificial tree, and they have gotten a huge piece of the pie,” said Doug Hundley, a grower in North Carolina who is spokesman for the National Christmas Tree Association.
Sales of natural trees were flat in 2017 from the year before, with 27 million Americans purchasing them in each of the two years, according to the association’s annual survey, compared to a 13 percent increase in fake trees, to 21.1 million in 2017. And since you don’t have to throw a fake tree out, over time they have accumulated a dominant position at Christmas.
“We estimate — and we don’t mind saying this so people will realize it — but 75 percent of the homes in America that have a Christmas tree will be using an artificial tree,” Hundley said. “And we’re not happy about that.”
The challenge facing real tree sellers increased substantially this year, said Jane Waterman, of Hyde Park, Vt. She and her husband, George Nash, have sold Christmas trees for the past 44 years from locations in New York City, putting up a staff of 50 tree sellers in five apartments.
Early snowstorms in northern Vermont and Canada have made digging out trees from several feet of snow difficult, Waterman said. Meanwhile, US immigration restrictions have reduced the number of seasonal workers available to cut them down. And new trucking regulations limiting drivers’ hours and mileage have meant fewer trees and higher prices.
“The cost of shipping has doubled this year,” she said.
To keep their staff connected, the couple tried using text messages to shuffle trees among uptown and downtown lots. But it was often a mess. So this year the team is using the Slack messaging service to keep up to date on the number of trees in each of their 19 locations around the city, which span from Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan to near the Harlem River in the Bronx.
When a space heater breaks, or a customer is looking for a 9-foot Serbian spruce, a team member can message the entire group on Slack and get help in seconds. They’ll often shuttle trees across the city to meet customer demands. At the end of the day, her sidewalk sellers Slack the running tree counts, so Waterman can quickly refill inventory.
“We keep track of every tree that we sell, how much we sold it for, and we can look at what trees we should buy and what should go,” she said. That allows her to keep her average tree price at $75, or half of what a tree costs in SoHo, she said.
In all, Waterman and Nash sell more than 20,000 trees each year, with only about 100 left over.
“It’s all the technology,” she said. “We keep track of every last penny.”
Technology is a relatively new facet of acquiring a Christmas tree. But as customers seek convenience in the harried holiday season, they’re turning to the Internet for just about everything else. So why not trees?
A few tree farms have been shipping trees via FedEx for three decades, Hundley said. But the concept got some high profile exposure this fall when Amazon — of course — announced it will ship full size Douglas firs, Norfolk Island pines, and other fresh Christmas trees.
Purists and Amazon critics saw this as another encroachment of the e-commerce giant into small independent businesses.
But Hundley says Amazon doesn’t pose much of a threat.
“The idea that Amazon getting into the business is going to somehow threaten tree sales by retail people — I don’t think it will,” he said. “It’s not that many trees.”
Feccia isn’t afraid of the retail behemoth, either.
“Amazon is not on the floor sweeping up needles,” he said. “That’s us.”
On Friday night, he delivered a tree to Meghan Ariagno, 34, and her sister Katelyn, 37. The siblings had set out to buy a tree from the same seller in South Boston as last year, but it wasn’t there this year. The sisters were planning their annual “cookiepalooza” for this weekend, and so needed a tree quickly.
“Home Depot didn’t have the charm we were looking for,” Meghan Ariagno said.
That’s where Christmas Tree 4 Me came in.
“We’re traditionalists, but this is definitely not that traditional,” Ariagno said on Friday. “But we’re having friends over to cook cookies from scratch, so it evens itself out.”