500,000 Glass Ornaments in Four Seasons: Prepping Lucky 13 Trading’s Christmas Line for Amazon

For four Christmas seasons, Marketplace Prep was Bob Steele’s main prep partner for his ornament line on Amazon. The first year was slow, because glass ornaments are among the hardest products to prep without breaking them. By the third year we were planning in November, receiving in February and shipping to Amazon in August, so his inventory was in stock and selling before most sellers had started prepping. The lesson is not about speed. It is about planning early enough that speed stops mattering.

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Client: Lucky 13 Trading (Bob Steele)
Channel and years: Amazon FBA, 2021 to 2024
Volume: About 500,000 glass ornaments; 300,000+ in 2023

What made it hard

500 to 1,000 ornament styles a season, over 98% of them glass, and many of them nearly identical.

Each style had its own label, its own bag size and its own box. Most ornaments did not arrive ready to label. They came in trays of 6 to 24 pieces, wrapped in tissue paper, packed in cartons.

Every piece had to be sorted, unpacked, checked, bagged in the right bubble bag, labeled and boxed, often in a custom box. In the biggest year, about three full truckloads came in, alongside lights, figurines, tree toppers, garland, outdoor decor and nearly every other category of Christmas decor, much of it fragile.

2021: building the workflow

We spent most of the first season working out how to move that many fragile, look-alike pieces without breaking them or mixing them up. It was slower than it should have been. We say that plainly because it is how the process that came later got built.

What we changed

By the third season, four changes had turned it into a repeatable operation.

01

Start in February, not September

We received inventory early in the year and prepped through spring and summer, so nothing waited for a fall rush.

02

One label roll on the table at a time

Each roll was numbered and tied to one style and one box size. Only one style was worked at a station at a time, which is how 500+ similar styles stayed separate.

03

A dedicated ornament area

Permanent shelves and tables set up for this work alone, instead of rebuilding the setup every season.

04

A trained crew

The same trained people each season, instead of new temps learning glass on the job.

2023: the season it all came together

01

November 2022: planning

Planning with Bob for the next season.

02

February 2023: receiving begins

Inventory starts arriving at low volume.

03

March to July: steady prep

A few hundred ornaments on slow days and a few thousand on busy ones.

04

August and September: ship to Amazon

Shipments go to Amazon in high volume, already prepped.

05

October to December: selling

The inventory is already in Amazon’s network and selling while most sellers are still prepping theirs.

That season we prepped more than 300,000 ornaments. At peak, a crew of 10 to 20 people with set-up stations handled 6,000 to 10,000 ornaments a day. That was a peak, not an everyday rate.

Results

Bob’s inventory was in stock before the holiday rush.
The 2023 season sold very well.
Amazon flagged or rejected fewer of his shipments once the prep was dialed in.
Breakage was rare. Most damaged pieces arrived broken from the supplier, and we pulled them and reported them to Bob.
He kept us as his main ornament prep partner for all four seasons.

How it ended

The work ended as Bob’s health declined and he passed away. We worked with him for four Christmases, and the process in this story was built with him, season by season. We are grateful for that.

If this sounds like your product

The same approach works for sellers with seasonal or Q4 inventory that rushes in every fall, fragile products like glass and ceramics, hundreds of similar-looking styles where a mixed-up label costs you, or full truckloads that arrive at once and need to be prepped in stages. The time to plan next Christmas is earlier than most sellers think.

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About these numbers: volumes are Marketplace Prep’s rounded figures for the Lucky 13 Trading account, 2021 to 2024. Daily figures are peak days, not averages.