Spode Christmas Tree Buying Guide: Tablescapes, Platters, Angel Figurines & More (From Someone Who's Made the Mistakes)

I've spent the last six years buying Spode Christmas merchandise for a mid-sized gift shop, and I've made just about every mistake you can make. Fourteen significant ones, actually, totaling roughly $12,000 in wasted budget. I still kick myself for the 2023 platter disaster, and I'll get to that in a minute. Now I maintain our team's ordering checklist so nobody else has to learn these lessons the expensive way.

The biggest lesson? There is no universal Spode stock list that works for every store. Your choices depend on your customers, your display space, and whether you're selling to tabletop enthusiasts, gift hunters, or people who just want one beautiful statement piece for Christmas lunch. After enough trial and error, I've found that most Spode Christmas questions fall into one of four scenarios. Here's how I think about them now.

Scenario A: The Full 'Spode Christmas Tree Tablescape' Customer

These are the customers who come in with photos of beautifully layered tables, asking, "How do I make this look like that?" They want the whole scene: dinner plates, salad plates, mugs, serving bowls, and ideally a centerpiece. They're not buying a plate; they're buying the feeling of a picture-perfect Christmas morning.

If this is your core customer, invest in complete place settings and at least one statement platter. The mistake I made in my first year was ordering 40 individual dinner plates without matching salad plates or mugs. Customers were thrilled to find the dinner plates, but they couldn't complete a setting, and I ended up discounting the lot in January (which, honestly, felt like throwing money away). The pieces you want to sell are rarely the pieces that sell themselves.

Display idea: create a fully set table in your store window. Not just stacked plates—a real tablescape with linen napkins, candles, and glasses. That single display paid for itself within two weeks. Customers need to see the whole vision before they can justify the purchase. When we finally did the full setup, our average sale jumped noticeably. I can't prove the exact cause, but the correlation was hard to ignore.

The quality angle: This is where your brand impression lives. A full Spode tablescape communicates "we sell serious, beautiful things." If you try to cut corners by stocking cheaper versions of the same look, your store gets remembered as the place with "the fake stuff." I'm not talking about other heritage brands—there's room for plenty of them on a shelf. I'm just saying that a tired, mismatched display will hurt your credibility no matter what premium name is printed on the underside.

Scenario B: The 'Just Give Me a Spode Christmas Platter' Customer

These customers aren't building a collection. They're hosting Christmas lunch and they want one gorgeous serving piece to be the hero on the table. They don't care whether the dessert plates match; they want the platter. In their minds, it's the easiest way to add instant tradition to their holiday.

My biggest regret in this category: the 2023 large-platter over-order. I bought 200 of the largest oval platters because they looked amazing in the distributor's catalogue. They did not move. The medium size, on the other hand, sold out before Thanksgiving. To be fair, the large ones are spectacular, but they're a hard sell for most households and most shop shelves. They look like catering equipment until someone actually stops to imagine them full of glazed ham.

If I could go back to January 2023, I'd buy mostly medium platters, a smaller number of large ones, and a few rimmed soup bowls that double as serving pieces. Sometimes the practical choice is the profitable choice.

Here's the other thing nobody warns you about: customers will ask about dishwasher safety on every single piece. Spode is fine bone china, and many pieces are labeled dishwasher-safe, but not all of them are. Do not assume. I learned this the hard way with a return that cost more in shipping than the margin on the sale. Verify before you promise anything, and if you're unsure, say so. An honest "I don't know" is better than a confident guess.

One surprise: the platters we photographed on a styled table with a sprig of holly sold faster than the ones we photographed flat. Context matters. A platter floating on a white background is just an object; a platter surrounded by roast chicken and pine branches is an invitation.

Scenario C: Gifts, Angel Figurines, and the Underrated Greeting Card

Gift buyers are a completely different game. They don't care about setting a full table; they want something meaningful for under $100. This is where angel figurines come in. Angel figurines are the classic "I don't know what to get Grandma" purchase. In our store, they sell steadily from September through December, and the Spode ones justify their higher price point because they photograph well and feel substantial in the hand.

The thing that surprised me most—and I'm still a little embarrassed about it—was the greeting cards. I ordered a small box of Spode Christmas cards almost as an afterthought. They outsold the angel figurines three-to-one in November. Never expected that. Turns out the $8 price point made them an easy add-on for someone already buying a platter or a set of mugs. People want a piece of the brand without committing to a $120 dinner plate.

So if you're torn between a deep order of figurines and a wider mix of small items, don't sleep on paper goods. They take up almost no space, they make your checkout counter look intentional, and they give customers a low-risk way to bring the brand into their home. We now order greeting cards at the same time we order figurines, and it's one of the easiest inventory decisions we make all season.

If you want to add a personal touch, teach your staff to draw a simple Christmas ornament. Honestly, I'm not sure why this became a thing in our store—my assistant started posting a "how to draw a christmas ornament easy" style video on our Instagram and it got more engagement than our product photos. It felt absurd at the time, but it worked. People love seeing how the Spode pattern translates into ornaments, and it gave us a fun topic for our own in-store card display.

Quality matters here too. A poorly glazed figurine or a flimsy card reflects directly on your shop. You don't need to stock the most expensive version of everything, but the pieces you choose to represent the Spode brand should be pieces you'd be proud to receive yourself.

Scenario D: The Content Creator / DIY Customer

This is the newest group, and I almost missed it entirely. In 2022, a customer asked to buy a single miniature ornament just for a flat-lay photoshoot for her food blog. I nearly talked her out of it because the order was so small. She ended up posting the photos with our store tagged, and we gained 400 followers in a week.

If you have a local audience that cares about seasonal styling, stock a few "characterful" pieces that aren't part of the main dinnerware sets: mini ornaments, snow globes, specialty shapes. These customers might never spend thousands on a full tablescape, but they will create exactly the kind of visual marketing money can't buy. They're also more likely to come back for gifts later because they remember your store as "the place with the pretty Christmas things."

My rule now: never dismiss a small, weird request. It's usually a signal that a new customer segment is forming (mental note: I really should write this down in the staff handbook). Content creators are not "real customers" in the traditional sense, but they influence real customers. One post from a local food blogger brought in four or five young couples who said they saw it on Instagram. That's a pretty good return on a single ornament.

How to Tell Which Scenario You're In

You don't need to pick a single scenario forever, but you do need to know which one your store leads with. Asking "what should I buy" before asking "who's buying it" is a recipe for inventory regret. Here's a quick self-check:

• Do customers come in asking to set the whole table? → Lead with Scenario A.
• Do they say "I'm looking for a serving platter" by name? → Lead with Scenario B.
• Does your checkout area already sell cards and small gifts? → Lead with Scenario C.
• Does your social media get more traction from tutorials and behind-the-scenes content than from product listings? → Lead with Scenario D.

You can combine scenarios if your store has the space and the clientele. Tabletop-focused shops often pair A and B. Gift and lifestyle stores often pair C and D. What doesn't work is trying to be everything at once. A crowded store with a bit of everything just looks like a gift shop; an edited store with a clear point of view looks like a destination.

As of January 2025, our current checklist includes all four scenarios, but the inventory ratios are very different from where I started. We now keep medium platters and greeting cards at the top of the reorder list, and we save the large platters for stores with more floor space or a stronger catering clientele. We order angel figurines in two sizes instead of one, and we keep a small shelf of miniature ornaments for the content creators and last-minute shoppers.

One more thing: don't forget the story behind the brand. According to the Spode Museum Trust, the Christmas Tree pattern was designed by Harold Holdway in 1938. It's been a staple of English Christmas tables for generations, and it shows no sign of slowing down. That's exactly why getting your mix right matters: customer expectations will follow the brand name, and your job is to make sure those expectations land well. Quality isn't just about the product; it's about how the product makes your store look in the process.

If you only take one thing from this guide, let it be this: track what actually sells in your store, not what you think should sell. We've caught 47 potential inventory mistakes using our checklist in the past 18 months. That's 47 errors I didn't have to reorder from or apologise for. The easy path is to order a little bit of everything; the smarter path is to become the shop that knows exactly which Spode each customer needs—and I'd rather be that shop.