ARLINGTON — Walking through the Art of Appreciation Gift Baskets warehouse in Arlington is like walking through Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. There’s a chocolate room, a ribbon room and a bow room. A number of workers hurry back and forth carrying teddy bears or boxes of cookies while others put finishing touches on cellophane-wrapped parcels.
Overseeing the whole operation are Anji and Bill Cozart. What began as a small home business at the Cozarts’ house has grown into a 40,000-square-foot warehouse operation that employs more than 30 people and ships products all over the world.
The Cozarts are currently in their so-called slow season, that brief period between Father’s Day and Halloween when they can get ahead on inventory for non-holiday occasions such as baby showers and birthdays.
“If we don’t do those in the summer, we won’t get to do them for the next nine months. We’re busy all year long,” Anji Cozart said.
In fact, the company has been experiencing ongoing growth since its inception back in 2000. That’s when the stay-at-home mom with a business background and an artistic flair first realized she needed something more to keep her occupied.
It was Bill Cozart who initially came up with the idea for her to start a home-based business. At first they thought of buying an existing business, but the Cozarts soon figured out that they were more than capable of starting up a new business on their own.
With an initial investment of $3,000, Anji Cozart used her creative skills to pack and decorate high-end gift baskets in the loft of their home. The baskets contain a mix of gift items, quality snacks and gourmet foods.
“We used to dance around the house every time she sold a gift basket,” Bill Cozart joked.
The gift baskets sold at an encouraging pace but the real increase in growth happened in 2004. That’s when she began to sell her products on Amazon.com. The timing couldn’t have been better.
“It was in that period where they were just opening up their gourmet foods,” Anji Cozart remembered. “So we kind of got in on the ground floor and really developed some strong relationships there.”
Bill Cozart, a retired Navy commander, was working for the Seattle Times when his wife started her business. By 2007, the company was growing so fast that he quit his job and came on board with her full time.
The company soon took over the house and there was an urgent need to get the business into a bigger space. Unfortunately, the space they chose was far too small to keep up with their pace of growth. Eventually they moved to move to the 40,000-square-foot warehouse in Arlington.
Art of Appreciation continued to grow, even through the deepest troughs of the Great Recession. The business experienced a slight growth slowdown in 2009 but the company never stagnated.
In a recession, luxury items are usually the first things that suffer, Anji Cozart said. But Art of Appreciation was able to redevelop product lines to remain affordable and continue to attract customers.
“That’s the thing about the gift basket business,” Bill Cozart said. “You constantly have to reinvent yourself. If you sell the same products over and over, they get old to the customers. So we’re constantly looking for new products that improve the quality and improve the perceived value to the customer.”
Something else that boosted Art of Appreciation in the recession was the 2011 bankruptcy of gourmet gift basket giant Harry and David. As Harry and David withdrew from certain areas of the market to regroup, it left space for Art of Appreciation to move in and take a larger portion of the gift basket market.
The Cozarts are looking to further expand Art of Appreciation in the future, especially in the area of corporate gift sales. Some larger businesses already have corporate accounts with Art of Appreciation, but this is an area that they want to see increase.
The Cozarts also want to expand to other online marketplaces. Currently the company offers products through their own website, Amazon’s wholesale and retail outlets and Overstock.com. Although there is no showroom, customers can purchase gift baskets from the front desk at the warehouse at 19405 68th Drive NE, Suite A, Arlington.
“Most people don’t know we’re here,” Anji Cozart said. The warehouse is hidden behind a lumber mill off of 67th Avenue NE in Arlington next to the UPS drop-off site. But a steady stream of employees, some seasonal and most permanent, head through the doors there every day.
In the early days of the business, the Cozarts themselves worked very long hours, especially at the holiday season. Nowadays, they find they can delegate more tasks to their staff and enjoy something a little bit closer to traditional business hours during the non-holiday months.
But even though the onetime stay-at-home mom doesn’t get a chance to stay home as much as she wants to, she isn’t complaining.
“We’re still having fun,” Anji Cozart said. “It’s a unique mix of people and it’s still fun for us. And what we do makes people happy, so that’s not a bad route to take in life.”
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