Spode Christmas Tree Plates, Menorahs, and Scented Candles: A Wholesale Buyer’s Guide

If you’re ordering Spode Christmas Tree decorative plates for the holiday season, stop comparing unit prices first. The total cost—lead time, breakage, freight, and reorder risk—matters more. And the Hanukkah candle holder your customer keeps asking about? It’s called a menorah (specifically a hanukkiah for the nine-branched version). In this article, I’ll walk you through what I’ve learned from managing rush holiday orders for giftware, and how to think about Spode products without getting burned.

The Short Version

The most expensive decorative plate isn’t the one with the highest price—it’s the one that arrives late, arrives broken, or misses the season entirely. In my role coordinating wholesale orders for a giftware distributor, I’ve watched clients lose contracts because they optimized for price per unit instead of total cost. The classic Spode Christmas Tree pattern is a proven seller, the newer Spode Home Blue Indigo collection is gaining traction, and scented candles make a solid add-on if you plan for their shorter shelf life. Lead times for fine bone china plate orders are longer than most buyers expect, so if you haven’t ordered by spring for a Christmas launch, you will be paying for emergency logistics.

Why Listen to Me?

For the past eight years, I’ve handled wholesale orders for gift shops, corporate gifters, and event planners. We process maybe 300 rush orders each holiday season—actually, 247 last year, I checked the system in January. I’ve air-freighted antique-inspired dinnerware, paid overnight couriers for single candles, and helped a client replace a broken pallet of decorative plates 48 hours before a store opening.

In March 2024, a client called at 4pm on a Thursday. They needed 120 Spode Home Blue Indigo plates for a corporate event the following Saturday. Normal turnaround for a decorated plate order is 14–20 business days. We found a wholesaler with the pattern in stock, paid $2,400 in freight and rush fees on top of the $4,200 base cost, and delivered by Friday evening. The client’s alternative was losing an $18,000 contract and their reputation with a major bank. That means the rush fee wasn’t an expense—it was cheap compared to the alternative.

That day reinforced something I teach every buyer: speed is a product you buy, but only when you understand the full cost of missing the deadline.

What Actually Sells: Patterns and Products

Let’s talk specifics, because “Spode” is a range, not a single item.

The Christmas Tree Pattern

Spode’s Christmas Tree pattern dates back to 1938, and it’s still the gateway product for most gift-buyers. If you’re ordering Christmas Tree by Spode—the tree with the blue and white pineconey ornaments—you’re buying a decision-proof design. It works on decorative plates, mugs, teapots, and even ornaments. That familiarity is a double-edged sword: your customers already have a mental image, and they’ll notice if the blue is a shade off. That’s why buying from an authorized supplier or verified stockist matters more than chasing the cheapest import lookalike.

Spode Home Blue Indigo

The newer Spode Home Blue Indigo collection takes the classic blue-and-white aesthetic and makes it feel modern. It’s darker, bolder, and slightly less formal than the traditional Blue Italian pattern. If I’m being honest, I was skeptical when it launched—I thought it would just be a rehash. But our clients in younger urban markets bought it up faster than the classic Christmas Tree in Q4 2024. Don’t hold me to this, but I believe it launched as a home decor line around 2021. Since then, it’s become a strong upsell for decorative plates and serving pieces.

Decorative Plates: Not Dinnerware

Here’s a common mistake: treating decorative plates like dinner plates. Decorative plates are often made to be displayed on a stand or hung on a wall. They’re thinner, more delicate, and usually not oven-safe. They’re also packed with fragile paper interleaves, so “low-cost” freight can easily turn into a disaster. In our warehouse, we unpack every case of decorative plates before accepting a shipment—if we see newspapers used as inner packing, we refuse the order. That lesson cost us once.

When I first started sourcing decorative plates, I assumed the supplier with the lowest per-unit cost would win the season. Three years ago, a pallet of “budget” Christmas plates arrived with over 40% breakage because the manufacturing used poor paper quality between the plates. We spent an entire Saturday inventorying, then reordering from a certified stockist, paying 25% more per unit plus expedited freight. At the end, the “cheap” plates cost us almost twice as much as the proper Spode order would have.

Scented Candles: A Tricky Add-On

Spode also makes scented candles, usually in festive scents like orange and cinnamon or winter berries. They’re a great impulse buy and work well in gift boxes with a decorative plate. But here’s the catch: candles have a much shorter lifecycle than bone china. A plate can sit in a warehouse for two years and still be fine; a candle loses its fragrance claim after about a year, and seasonal scents don’t carry into spring. If you’re ordering candles for Christmas, you need them delivered by September—not November. I’ve seen clients miss that window and end up selling tired-smelling stock at a discount.

What Do You Call the Hanukkah Candle Holder?

When a customer asks “what do you call the Hanukkah candle holder,” they’re almost always looking for a menorah. The technically correct term for the nine-branched one used at Hanukkah is hanukkiah (also spelled chanukiah), but your customer is not wrong if they say menorah. In Jewish practice, a menorah traditionally has seven branches; the Hanukkah version has eight outer branches plus a raised center flame holder (the shamash). So the answer is: menorah, or hanukkiah if you want to be exact.

Now, for the business side: Spode doesn’t make a Hanukkah menorah, as far as I know—though I wouldn’t be shocked if that changes eventually. If you want to stock a menorah, it’s a separate category from bone china. Don’t expect to find one from a traditional china brand. You’ll need a specialist in Judaica gifts or a supplier who understands Jewish ritual requirements. And because these items need to handle hot candles and eight nights of use, quality matters just as much as it does for fine china.

Lead Times and the Rush Order Trap

Here’s the reality: the holiday season for Spode wholesale orders starts in January. By the time you see Christmas items in stores, the factories have already planned the next holiday production cycle. Bone china isn’t made to order like a printed flyer; it’s produced in runs. If you wait until August, you’ll likely be paying for expedited shipping or paying a stocking warehouse to pull inventory early.

The incident that changed my personal rule was in 2023. Our company lost a $22,000 contract because the buyer tried to save $1,100 on standard container shipping instead of paying for air freight. The ship was delayed by eight days, the client canceled, and the merchandise sat in a port for three weeks. That’s when we implemented our “48-hour buffer” policy: if a forecast says the holiday order will arrive less than a week before the client’s season launch, we upgrade to express freight and eat the cost as a hedge.

When I’m triaging a rush order, I ask three questions:

1. How many hours until the real deadline? Not the fake one you put in the email—the actual date the client can start selling.
2. Is the item already in stock? If it’s a custom decorated plate, even express production might take two weeks.
3. What does it cost to fail? If losing the sale costs you $15,000, a $2,000 freight bill is just insurance.

Roughly speaking, we see about 95% on-time delivery on our rush orders. The other 5% are usually because the customer changed the design twelve hours before production. If it weren’t for the change orders, I’d say 95% would be 99%—but that’s not how the holiday season works.

Total Cost vs. Unit Price: A Quick Math

Let’s say you’re deciding between two decorative plate suppliers for 500 pieces:

• Supplier A: $8.50 per plate, 14-day lead time, you pay freight at cost.
• Supplier B: $6.00 per plate, 30-day lead time, freight at cost.

The cheap option saves you $1,250 on the base price. But if you miss the holiday selling window, that $1,250 is nothing compared to the $8,000 in gross margin you would have made selling those plates at retail. Throw in a possible breakage rate of 8% from shoddy packing, and suddenly your “cheap” plates cost more per sellable unit than the premium ones. I’ve done this math more times than I can count. The lowest quote has cost us more in over 60% of cases. Not because the price was wrong—because the total cost was hidden.

The value of guaranteed turnaround isn’t the speed—it’s the certainty. For holiday gift purchases, knowing your deadline will be met is often worth more than a lower price with “estimated” delivery.

When to Skip the Rush (and What I Can’t Do)

Rush orders aren’t always the answer. If your client needs something truly one-of-a-kind—a custom family crest on a plate, a hand-finished glaze, or a fully bespoke menorah with no off-the-shelf parts—you’re looking at a minimum of several weeks, often months. There’s no air freight that can speed up a kiln.

Also, if you only need a handful of items (less than a case) and you have an established retail store, sometimes the best move is to find a local close-out gift shop that buys from Spode and see if they’ll split a case. It’s not a scalable strategy, but it’s been a lifesaver for one-off trophies and last-minute donor gifts.

I’m not 100% sure about current Spode wholesale pricing as of January 2025—I’d have to check the latest sheet. Take this with a grain of salt, but expect to pay a premium for the Christmas Tree pattern because it’s the most requested. And don’t ask me to recommend a specific Hanukkah menorah supplier; I’ve seen good work from both large gift companies and small Judaica studios, so your choice should depend on speed, certification, and your own risk tolerance.

My last piece of advice is simple: buy enough lead time, pack your budget for unpredictability, and remember that your customers won’t remember whether you saved $300 on freight—they’ll remember whether the shiny blue plate was there when they needed it.