OMP Holiday Gift Guide: Buy Cool Things, Support Local Businesses

If you subscribe to the Old Mission Gazette email newsletter, you should have received our first OMP Holiday Gift Guide yesterday.

If you don’t subscribe and would like to, there’s a “subscribe” bar at the top of this page. The Gazette newsletter is our way to let you know about new stories on the Gazette website. You click the links in the newsletter to go read the rest of the story on this website you’re reading right now. It’s a beautiful thing.

And we just crossed 12,000 email subscribers – I know, that’s crazy! Our subscribers are people who live on the OMP all year or during the summer, live in the Grand Traverse region, or used to live here and long to come home. Honestly, I think anyone who’s ever had a connection to the Old Mission Peninsula is getting our email newsletter.

At any rate, last year around this time, I started getting emails from creatives and makers and entrepreneurs asking if I had a way to help promote their products and services during the holidays. At the time, I didn’t, but it lit a fire in me to figure out how to make that happen. These are folks who might not want to advertise in the Gazette all year or might have a limited budget or any number of other things.

So in August of this year – two months ago – it all came together in my brain: I need to create an OMP Holiday Gift Guide. This would serve a lot of purposes:

• Provide a way for artists, crafters, farmers, small business owners, etc. to promote their products and services during the holiday season at an affordable cost.
• Give our Gazette readers a way to “buy local” and help support small businesses they might not otherwise know about. Oh, and buy really cool things to give as gifts or for themselves.
• Generate another revenue stream to help keep Old Mission Gazette humming along. Here are some other ways to help support the Gazette.
• Give me an opportunity to do what I love – help promote awesome things made by awesome people, learn more about the people in our community, and also create beautiful newsletters and web pages. I love all that stuff.

So, as mentioned, yesterday we emailed the first OMP Holiday Gift Guide – you can see it either in your email or right here. If you’re a numbers person, since sending that Gift Guide yesterday, we’ve had 84% opens and 76% clicks. If you’re not a numbers person, those are good numbers.

I am also in the process of creating a Gift Guide page here on the website and will let you know when that happens – probably this weekend.

There will be five more OMP Holiday Gift Guides emailed between now and Dec. 25. If you would like to be included in those, click here for more info, or just email me, [email protected] and I’ll send you some info.

By the way, if you unsubscribe from the OMP Holiday Gift Guide email, know that you’re also unsubscribing from the Old Mission Gazette newsletter. So if you unsubscribe and are wondering why you’re not getting the regular Gazette newsletter, that’s why. (Moral of the story: never unsubscribe from anything we send you.)

Here are the amazing people and businesses currently in the OMP Holiday Gift Guide (again, read more about them here):

• Effe Goods
• Chateau Chantal Wine Club
• Cari Noga, Author of “The Orphan Daughter” (set on the OMP!)
• OMPstore.com (our sister site where we sell OMP things)
• Lavender on Old Mission Peninsula
• Tutu the Pointe
• Warren Orchards Between the Bays
• Secret Garden at Brys Estate
• Pure Imagination Custom Jewelry (cool OMP jewelry)
• Bella nōVA Essential Oils
• Empireblu Vintage Furnishings
• Neahtawanta Candle Co.
• Benjamin Twiggs Cherry Products
• Old Mission Panthers Vintage Gear (a sideshoot of OMPstore.com)

Thank you to all of our amazing Gift Guide partners! And again, let me know if you’d like to be included!