How to Win Black Friday Cyber Monday

0:00Black Friday, Cyber Monday is the ultimate sales period of the year. And behind every sold out product or viral campaign is a founder with a game plan. Want to learn how the best in the business prepare for the biggest sales event of the year? You're in the right place. From focused inventory planning. What are the five to 10 collections that we just have to focus on for this season to make sure we're in stock of these bestsellers? To reaching new customers. This holiday for us is all about, you know, building messaging and a marketing campaign around the family. Building your own promotional window.

0:29People start shopping earlier and earlier every year. We're going to start our holiday sale on like November 15th. Finding the right balance between all your sales channels. You've got to get all these different partners aligned. Prices got to go down uniformly at the exact same time. Or trying out new strategies. There's so many exciting things. This year we're gamifying a lot of what we're doing. We've got the best of Black Friday and Cyber Monday strategies here on Shopify Masters. Your companion for starting and scaling a business. First up, Michelle Razavi of Alawi, a protein dessert company with its sights set on doubling sales this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

1:06We are increasing our inventory to make sure we're fully stocked. We are getting our logistics team prepared. We're already starting our campaigns for marketing, for email and SMS a month and a half out. We're doing test strategies. We're also going to do an early access sale for our customers that, again, we want to give them a sneak peek and just making sure that we're testing everything on the site. So we're going to be updating the website. We're going to be updating our pop-ups. And when you do that, you want to make sure that you're running through everything to make sure you're not breaking anything.

1:41So we do a lot of testing behind the scenes to make sure, okay, does this work, especially for new products and bundles? And, yeah, I'm really excited to gift everyone our biggest sales. This is going to be our biggest Black Friday yet, and I'm so excited and nervous and all the feelings. But for this year, we're going to have a new flavor launching right before, which I'm so excited about. We're going to be doing extra bundles. We're going to be doing gift purchases, just fun stuff that we've been waiting to do all year. This is an opportunity for us to reward our very loyal customers with a very exciting discount so they can stock up during the holidays and going into the New Year's.

2:18And we're really excited for it. Peter Daring, CEO and founder of Peak Design, famous for camera gear and accessories, highlights why retail relationships are more important than ever. Sales are kind of a massive tactical undertaking, especially when you're on the channel, right? You've got to get all these different partners aligned. Price has got to go down uniformly at the exact same time. You don't want to offend your retail partners. You've got to think about in what ways are you sharing in any discounts that are out there. So there's all that partner coordination, but then I think inventory is one of the most important things.

2:52People need this stuff before jolly old St. Nick comes. And if you're not prepared, if you haven't pre-bought inventory, you can really get caught with your pants down and miss a ton of sales. We'll also hear from Lindsay Carter, CEO of Set Active, with an inside look at running Black Friday promotions in December for this activewear brand. So this year, for the first time ever, instead of doing like five drops, I think five or more, we're doing two big drops. We're not really doing anything like that crazy, but we doubled down on like knowing what sells well, knowing our best selling colors and reiterating and being creative on that.

3:30And I think that's like the blueprint, honestly, in business is understanding what your best sellers are and doubling down on innovating reiterations of what you know sells best already. Of course, there are times where you have to take risks and introduce new things. But knowing when to do that, how to do that, I think is really important. We're actually introducing Setmiss. It's the second time we're doing Setmiss, which is basically, it became a Black Friday for us. Like we made our own Black Friday in December and we call it Setmiss. And it almost performs, if not better than our Black Friday.

4:02Doing things on your own timeline. Yeah, I know. But it's also just like, how can you stand out against your competitors? There's so many deals happening. There's so many exciting things. This year, we're gamifying a lot of what we're doing. When you're on the page before a drop, you get to color your own set, and it can be submitted for something down the line if we want to make that eventually. We're just trying little creative things here and there that get people wanting to come back to us rather than go to a different deal or sale that goes on during that time. Joe Myers and Jeff Eiser from Revenge of the LA-based comic book store and pinball room share how they're putting their own unique twist on Black Friday.

4:44We are admittedly a bit counterculture, right, in terms of how we operate the business. So the last three years, we've done anti-Black Friday, which is we make all the pinball machines free for the whole day. And that's all we do. We don't have sales. We don't do any of that stuff. But what that does is it brings a ton of people to the store, and we end up having crazy high sales for the day. We lose out on the money from the pinball machines, but every pinball machine is packed the entire day. So this will be our fourth year doing that. Sounds like it works, right? So revenue that day is way up relative to your average.

5:21Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I think because we're a small local store and we're doing something that's like anti-establishment, people want to come spend money with us. And that was kind of the idea behind doing that that way. How long is the wait for the average pinball machine that day? We have like 27, 28 machines. Every single machine will be in play and then there'll be people just like packed in there. So yeah, we do post some rules on. Yeah, we have rules like don't be weird. You know, stuff like that. That's our main rule, actually. Don't be weird. Don't be weird. Number one rule. How do you identify if someone's being weird?

5:55I mean, you just know. You don't have to identify. It's a vibe based thing. I always try to do things that are giving things away or free to bring people in. So all of our events are free. We celebrated our three-year anniversary recently, and we had everyone go spend money at all these different businesses that we're friends with. And when they did that, they received a token that they were able to bring back and get a free t-shirt if they got all the tokens. So it's about creating a moment rather than how do we get more sales. Because I think if we create the moment, the sales will come. Yeah.

6:29I will say one of the things we're doing to enhance a little bit and we'll probably integrate in this year would be our loyalty program that we just relaunched. Now that we're fully on Shopify and everything's kind of lined up, we've identified our loyalty program and we've been using that to generate sales. And that'll probably be a thing where we can offer more to customers. While it might not be a sale, it'll probably be a double or maybe even a triple point day for people so they can come back again afterwards and cash those in. Yeah, I think leveraging the loyalty program is something that's like, it doesn't really cost us anything.

7:00And it gives people an incentive to come in and spend more money, but then also get more free stuff out of it. Gloria Huang, founder and CEO of Thousand, discusses how the Bike Helmet brand is reaching new audiences. Unlike every other, I feel like, consumer goods brands, like in our past history, Black Friday was never like crazy for us because we're a seasonal business and our season is summertime. So we'll do double or triple the sales in summer than we will in a January. So that was our high season. But because our kids' business expanded so much in this last couple of years, kids' business is crazy around holidays.

7:34So for us, we're really leaning into kids for the first time, I would say, ever in our history. And we're really focusing on bundles. Bundles for like the first-time writer. So everything your kid needs to be outfitted to get on the road. Bundles for families. Like, again, one kind of value proposition point we have is you can match your kid in like kind of matching helmets and stuff like that. So this holiday for us is all about, you know, building kind of a messaging and a marketing campaign around the family. I mean, it sounds like the way you're approaching Black Friday, Cyber Monday has meaningfully shifted in the last year or two.

8:08Yeah, for sure. So funnily enough, when we first started as a brand, we actually were anti-Black Friday. And on Black Fridays, we didn't do sales. We actually did really fun marketing campaigns just to cut the noise. And that's because, honestly, we didn't meaningfully have products to be able to offer in Black Friday. So we were like, why compete with all the discounts? I would say in recent years, we've learned that the family customer is just huge around the holidays. So for us, it's being able to give them a meaningful offer and building a meaningful marketing campaign. I'd say one really fun thing about this Black Friday is that in the holiday campaign, because we're featuring families so much, we're actually featuring my family in our marketing campaign.

8:46So little Scout will be on her little bike wheeling around somewhere. I hope you're paying her her full day rate. Yeah, she was tough to negotiate with, but we got her down. You know, if I was a kid, I'd be stoked to open up a helmet and bike gear under the tree. So I get it. Yeah. Well, our kids' helmets are really fun too because you can personalize them and customize them. That's like the big thing that we offer, like kids express their personal style. So really kids can open them up and then decorate them and then go out for a ride. Oh, so fun. bedazzle them. I know. Next, Lanny Smith, founder of Actively Black, talks all about managing inventory and supply chain for their always sold out athletic wear.

9:25We've been accumulating some cash flow to specifically earmark for inventory for this particular season. So looking at our historical data, you know, we're on the back end of Shopify and we're able to see like these are our A products, our B products, our C products. Great problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. so many of those products are considered A's. So it's like, how do you really shrink that down? But we're in that process right now of like, hey, what are the five to 10 collections that we just have to focus on for this season to make sure we're in stock of these bestsellers? The rest of them, we'll have to sacrifice until we are in a position where we have the cash flow to be able to restock completely.

10:03We're going long on those five to 10 bestselling collections that we just cannot keep in stock, making sure we have those for this season. And one of the pivots that we made that has actually turned into one of our most meaningful and purposeful collections is our 100 % cotton collection. Due to a lot of different economic changes, the global supply chain, all the different things, we made a conscious decision to reshore some of our manufacturing for our 100 % cotton collection that is all made from cotton that is grown from black farmers. So we partnered with black farmers and it's made in America.

10:40It's a hundred percent cotton. And essentially we're building a black owned supply chain, like literally from the cotton coming out of the ground to it being processed into the fabric, to being cut and sewn to us creating the product that I'm wearing one right now that, that, that people wear. And it's actually turned into one of our best selling collections of all time, partly because of the messaging, the purpose, the meaning behind it. You know, Black Americans have had a painful history with cotton for obvious reasons because of the history of slavery in America. But a lot of people don't know that in today's value, there were trillions of dollars of wealth that were generated off of cotton during that time that we were not able to participate in the wealth generation that happened.

11:25And so we're looking at this like this isn't reparations, this is reclamation. So you've got these black farmers who own this land. In fact, Bridgeforth Farms is one of the farms we're working with. They've owned their land for 150 years. They literally can trace back their lineage to Troy Bridgeforth's great, great, great, great grandfather was a slave. And after he was able to obtain his freedom, he bought this land and his family has owned it since then. And so this cotton that's coming from this land that they used to have to pick as slaves they were forced to and they could not profit from it they now own it and we get to support these farmers with this collection and they own it and they get to profit from it you know i mean it's just a it's a powerful story of reclamation that we're able to do through this brand and our audience has resonated with it in a very powerful way so there's a shorter turnaround time on that than what's coming from overseas so we're definitely stocking up on that and and obviously our other best sellers.

12:25And that's what we're preparing for, for Q4, Black Friday and beyond. Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge, reveals what goes into planning sales for a hundred million dollar brand. This will be our, you know, whatever, 10th in the business, something like that. And it does get easier every single year, right? I think the platforms have gotten more mature and more sophisticated. Like the worst thing that happened Black Friday, like 2017 is like Facebook goes down, right? Or your credit cards get banned, stuff like that. I think there's more tools. I think the platforms are more mature that like, it just doesn't happen as much.

12:58There's like some quick tips, right? So make sure you have your credit cards figured out for Facebook invoicing. And then besides that, it's like, look, buy your team lunch, be online for 24 seven and send more emails than you think. So I think people get nervous contacting their customers, but Black Friday is the one time where you have unlimited firepower and you can just send as many emails as you want. Put a plain text one in there. So one of the best performing emails we ever do is an early invitation to shop the sale. So plain text email sent in, Clavier, whatever else, just welcoming people to the sale, welcoming to be part of the brand, giving them early access to inventory or whatever else.

13:38The other thing is you should probably just run your sale longer than you think. A lot of people try to get it just to the day of Black Friday, But people start shopping earlier and earlier every year. We're going to start our holiday sale on November 15th. And we're going to extend that all the way to December 15th. Give people 30 days to get their holiday shopping done. Also, don't try to get cute with it. A lot of times people try to have 12 days of Christmas, different offers, different days. Nobody shops your website that much. Nobody looks at your website more than you. Nobody really cares that much.

14:08They just want to go to your website and know they can shop and not feel stupid. They're going to get a worse deal than somebody else. So very clean discounting, very clean messaging, way longer than you think, and make it foolproof. Very easy to understand what's happening. Those are my best tips. On a different note, Plant Material founder Matt Burroughs shares how his plant shop is choosing to support its community instead of focusing on Black Friday sales. Small Business Saturday has always been a lot of fun to see people coming out and supporting us. and the general landscape of small business retail that we exist in in LA.

14:45You know, we're on busy streets with lots of other retailers and all sorts of different industries. And it is great to see the excitement around that. We haven't ever really done sales. I think that our offering is differentiated enough to the point where I don't want to devalue the product, especially in season. This season, we do have a lot planned. We are planning to, first off, through the Thanksgiving weekend, we're working with a school down the street. They have a market planned for the weekend, and we're looking to give away free trees in Altadena. and so we've been working with some of our growing partners to bring in to donate some trees and the thought is that you could take a tree and plant it on your lot this first iteration of this tree giveaway will be a lot of fun and then we want to continue it through the season our altadena shop won't be open but we're going to have a market on december 13th and 14th and we've had these winter markets every year since we opened.

15:47They've just grown in size and scale and 90 % of the vendors are all Altadena based. And this year we'll be back. We won't be open as a retail store, but the site will be safe to be present on. And so we'll be setting up and I think we have to figure out the funnel from the free trees to the community. And there's a few little things we need to work on on that. But we intend to just continue to try to give away trees as much as we can get them in and get people planning. Hopefully they like the trees that we can get. They will be free trees, so we'll take whatever we can get. But I think that our growers have a lot of really cool stuff that they can allocate to us.

16:32For Body Care brand Salt & Stone, this will be their only sale of the year, and CEO Nima Jalali is all about celebrating his team. Black Friday, Cyber Monday is actually the only sale we participate in all year. And we are doing some slightly different things. But for the most part, I believe it's just the main thing will be the discount off of the site. But there'll be little additions to that, like free shipping thresholds and little gift with purchases that you can get if you spend a certain amount. But for the most part, it'll be very similar to what we did last year because it worked so well.

17:05Is there anything specific that you do that's different in terms of preparing for this big sales moment, given that it's the only one that you have of the year? I let my team do their thing now. So they're all prepping for it now and they're getting ready for it. So they're a lot more in the weeds on that than I am. They're the experts, so I trust in them. He's not packing boxes anymore. Founder Dr. Julie Chung of T3 tells us why it's all about offering their hero hair tools, along with a few surprise gifts. Black Friday is huge for us, obviously. We have some of our hero SKUs going on sale, which usually don't go on sale.

17:41It's namely our Air 360 and Air IQ. And then we've got gift with purchase for cases that come with them, which these cases have sold out time and time again when we put them on our website. So it's primarily gift with purchase and then discount on our hero SKUs, which again, usually doesn't happen. Casey Watalevich and Allie Walsh, founders of Canyon Coffee, will walk us through how they prepare everything in-house for one of their rare annual sales. We do very few promotions. We really do three a year for e-commerce and that's one of them. We have participated in it because we don't do many sales throughout the year.

18:18So I think people that have been following for Canyon know this is the time of year where we do a discount on all coffee. And we also, I think it was last year, did a free diner mug with purchase. Like we try to add different things, but I feel like people who follow Canyon look forward to this like one. We do like maybe our Canyon birthday sale and then maybe like one other. But the Black Friday sale is something we've done since the beginning and it always has done really well for us. Yeah, we'll do like three or four emails about it and then we'll just do it over the Black Friday weekend, that Thursday through Monday, actually.

18:55And it's always a discount on coffee. Do you guys have to do things different from your regular operations to ramp up for that and get prepared we've over the years you know we have our instant coffee which has been featured by wire cutter for years which we're like so grateful for and so we were always running out of that so now that was just planning ahead and sometimes it was you know like to throw down for a bunch of inventory like that out of cash flow was tough you know but one thing operationally we do everything in-house like ali said earlier so like we we roast we bag and we do all the shipping.

19:31There's no co-packer or 3PL involved. We used the 3PL for a few years to help us grow, to free us up for time to do more sales and stuff. But now it's all in-house. So operationally, it's just this year we'll probably add an extra shipping or delivery person or two because that's also the time of year where we do a lot of events. It's just always a lot, but it's fun. And to round out our show, Rachel Hawkehouser, co-founder of Peacework Puzzles, shares how the puzzle and home goods brand is adding a pop-up into the mix this season. Holiday season for a puzzle company is our Super Bowl. It is such a big deal.

20:10We, you know, that's when we do most of our business. So we really start preparing for early. We always look at, you know, what we've done in years past and how we want to tweak it looking forward. So we will be obviously doing promotions on our site, we're going to be doing an in-person pop-up in New York City over that weekend and into a couple weeks after, which will be really fun because we don't have a lot of opportunities for customer interaction and, you know, brick and mortar experiences. And just, you know, kind of as a team uniting to drive home the message of our big sale. You guys are experts, it seems, in this space with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, because holiday is so huge for puzzles, as you said.

20:51Any advice for early stage founders in terms of wrapping their head around sort of the magnitude of it? We're seeing sales start much earlier. I mean, each year it seems like they start far before Thanksgiving. And each year that passes, they creep even earlier on the calendar. So Black Friday, Cyber Monday used to be this four-day event. It's now turned into two-plus weeks. Just be really aware of what your competitors are offering and making sure that you offer something that is just as good as they are. Thanks for tuning into Shopify Masters. Subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can learn from the masterminds behind your favorite brands.

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