“Consumers buy the decorations they like on the spot, in small amounts and reuse the decorations they bought in previous years,” said Andreea Mihai, who has been working for the retailer for about thirteen years.
Carrefour stores sell about 1.3 million Christmas decorations at this time of the year and the best sellers are Christmas-themed home decor items, Santa suits, wreaths, candlesticks, as well as Christmas trees and tinsel.
“Sales peak a few days ahead of Christmas,” she added.
Romania has few companies that make ornaments, artificial Christmas trees and other season decorations. The making of decorations starts long before the holidays, at the beginning of the year in some cases, but generates hefty profits for the companies in this business.
One such example is Rom-Handcraft company based in Arges County, southern Romania, which sells handmade Christmas ornaments especially to customers abroad.
“We export to the United States of America and to Germany, but also decided to make ornaments for the Romanian market,” says Vasile Stevoiu, the manager of the company.
Rom-Handcraft started manufacturing Christmas tree ornaments in 2005, taking over the business of Rom Icecoop, which handled exports of such products.
The company selected the best craftspeople in the area and established a business that posted 1.7 million lei (about EUR380,000) revenue last year.
Another company in the Christmas decorations business is Prodglob Clasic Glass in Cluj-Napoca, which ended the year with RON1.5 million revenue, RON8,000 net profit and 35 employees.
There are also foreign companies making Christmas decorations in Romania, such as Moranduzzo Romania set up in the town of Gottlob, Timis County (west of the country), whose owner is Italy’s Dario Moranduzzo, established in 1946. Moranduzzo bought from the Romanian government about 80% in Agromec Gottlob in 1997, a company that owned a number of buildings used as workshops repairing agricultural equipment until 1990.
The investment in the Gottlob subsidiary amounted to some EUR3.5 million, if including the cost of transferring the equipment and technology needed to make decorations, repurposing the existing buildings and constructing storage space.
The company sold artificial Christmas trees, ornaments, tinsel, lights and season-themed home decor items last year, posting almost RON6 million revenue. Moranduzzo Romania had 46 employees on average in 2012, according to its reports. (EUR1=RON4.4756)
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)